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President Biden: Don't Give Wall Street Control of Our Public Water Systems (www.commondreams.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ya, look up Johnstown PA. Home of one of the worst “natural disasters” in US history that happened to be caused by a rich asshole who didn’t care about people. This was the city that built Pittsburgh and it lost literally everything overnight and corrupt leaders made sure that industry never returned. We’re now known as a great stop on the PA drug highway because of the corruption. Nothings improved since they finally got out of the debt. It’s only gotten worse. And we’re still paying taxes on a flood from the 1800’s. Realistically they sold off the water lines to a private company and pocketed the profit and are publicly celebrating screwing people over. And it will never change.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wow, that's terrible. From my reading, this is the series of events:

Rich group bought the old reservoir to use as a sporting resort
Group modified the dam to be lower to support a road, and failed to repair the emergency release equipment
Record rainfall caused rivers to surge
Rides sent to Johnstown warning of the impending failure of the dam were ignored
The dam burst because they couldn't release water (see 2) and tons of people died because they had no warning (see 4)

So not only was there a natural disaster, but two other errors that both could have avoided loss of life.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Andrew Carnegie is celebrated in Pittsburgh but is abhorrently hated around here. For good reason. But you got it pretty right on the nose.