Science Friday - Flint’s Water Crisis, 10 Years Later | Underwater Cables Could Help Detect Tsunamis

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

While progress has been made in replacing water pipes in Flint, many residents say they still don’t know if their tap water is clean or not. Also, scientists are adding sensors to an underwater cable network to monitor changes in the ocean and quickly detect earthquakes and tsunamis.10 Years Later, Flint’s Water Crisis Still Isn’t OverIn 2014, city officials in Flint, Michigan, switched their water source to the Flint River, a move that was projected to save the city $5 million. Instead, the water corroded the city’s lead pipes, which led to multiple negative health impacts for local residents, including lead poisoning, and a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that resulted in a dozen deaths.Now, almost 30,000 homes and businesses have had their water lines replaced, but 1,900 others have still not been reviewed. The city says they’ve reached out to owners of these properties with no response and have not been able to move forward, but activists claim that the city hasn’t contacted them.Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross is joined by Vox senior correspondent Umair Irfan to talk about this and other top science news from this week, including new Long COVID trials that are underway, regulations from the EPA that require new coal and gas plants to limit 90% of their CO2 emissions, and a positive software update for Voyager 1.How Underwater Telecom Cables Could Help Detect TsunamisDeep under the sea, a wide network of cables crisscrosses the ocean floor, keeping the internet and other telecommunications online. While these cables have a big job to do, researchers want to make them even more important by giving them the ability to detect seismic activity and alert those on land of a tsunami risk earlier than is currently possible.Portugal is about to be the testing ground for these new, integrated cables, with a 3,700-kilometer cable to be installed between the Iberian country and the Madeira and Azores archipelagoes. This is a fitting place to pilot this, as Lisbon was the site of a devastating 1755 earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands.Joining guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to discuss the potential of smart cables is Dr. Bruce Howe, research professor of engineering at the University of Hawaii and chair of the United Nation’s SMART Cables Joint Task Force.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What if there was a better way to detect tsunamis faster? If the cable is closer to the trench that causes the earthquake, it can give significantly more early warning. It's Friday, April 26th, and you guessed it, it's Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. The bottom of the sea is home to a wide network of telecommunication cables. These are responsible for getting us our internet and connecting us to the world. For decades, researchers have thought, what if we can use these telecommunication cables as a way to detect earthquakes and tsunamis as early as possible?

We'll explore that story in just a little bit. But first, here's Ariel Duem Ross with the biggest science stories of the week. It was 10 years ago when city officials in Flint, Michigan, switched their water source to the Flint River, a move that was projected to save the city $5 million. Instead, the water corroded the city's lead pipes, which in turn caused a lead poisoning crisis, as well as an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease, which itself killed around a dozen people. So where do things stand now? Here to give us an update on the Flint water crisis, and to tell us about other top science stories this week is Umair Irfan, Senior Correspondent at Vox. Welcome to Science Friday, Umair.

Hey, Ariel. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being on the show. So it seems that a decade later, some people in Flint still don't know if they have clean water. How could that possibly be? Right. That's one of the key sources of frustration. Even though this was a national story, it became a huge scandal that went all the way up to the president of the United States. It's been a slow process to actually remediate and make sure that all the residents there can actually get clean drinking water. Now, city officials say that they're in the last leg of the process, that nearly 30,000 homes of business. have had their water service lines investigated and replaced.

But there's still a few thousand left. And a lot of residents are saying that they've been kept in the dark or not informed about the current status of their own lines or of their neighborhoods. And so they're not quite sure exactly where things stand. So this sort of miscommunication remains a core frustration. And that's part of why for residents, this is still a front of mind issue 10 years later. Right. This has been a problem from the start.

The issue of communicating with the community and actually making them feel like they're getting all the information they need. Yeah, that's right. And so one way they tried to get around that was to provide residents testing kits. There were also some outside water supplies. You know, similar to COVID, there was a lot of emergency stopgap measures that were put into place, but also similar to COVID. Those measures have now been rolled back.

And a lot of residents now feel like they're on their own, that they're doing a lot of these ad hoc tests or just, you know, developing community networks trying to figure out where the water tastes funny and who actually has useful water. And so it's still not this robust infrastructure that they really are hoping for. And since then, we've also seen in other U.S. cities having their own contamination problems as well, like Jackson, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey. And then more recently, we started learning about other water contaminants like PFS, these forever chemicals. The EPA said that, you know, close to maybe up to half of all drinking water in the U.S. may have some level of this contamination. And so while Flint, Michigan may have been something of the canary in the coal mine here, we're learning that water contamination is really a,

a bigger issue than we may have realized. And speaking of COVID, long COVID research seems to be ramping up right now with a handful of long COVID trials currently underway. Can you tell me about those? Yeah, that's right. You know, long COVID refers to those persistent symptoms that about 22 million people in the United States say they continue to face after having the infection of COVID-19 technically cleared from their bodies, you know, these range from things like brain fog, from, you know, persistent breathing issues, fatigue and so on. But because these are so, such disparate symptoms and they've been hard to categorize. They've also been hard to study in a really scientific way. But because there are so many people afflicted, now scientists are

actually building clinical trials to try to assess them. In particular, what they're looking at is the mechanism that they think might be at work here, that the virus may not have been fully cleared from these patients' bodies. Typically, you know, with respiratory illness like COVID-19, we would expect the virus in the lungs. But now they're finding that maybe potentially in long COVID patients, It's still in their gut, it's still in their bloodstream, and in other body tissues, and they're experimenting with different ways to potentially clear that last remaining bit of virus out. Right. And this kind of research is so important because so many people are deeply affected and still very much living a life where they have to protect themselves. Some people don't have the option to protect themselves from further infections, reinfections. So this stuff is really important.

And Bernie Sanders recently said that his office was drafting legislation around Longcove. right? Yes, as you note, that this is increasingly becoming a public health issue, that we're starting to see the effects in our economy, in health care, and with parents taking time off of work, or just simply not getting people back to 100%. And so by passing this legislation, what the senator and some other lawmakers are hoping to do is to begin the process of collecting information from patients, from educators, from health care workers about exactly how this is manifesting and then trying to come up with the list of resources that they want to then advocate for in order to make sure that these people can try to get some semblance of normalcy back.

So next, the EPA announced new regulations around gas and coal power plants. What are they? Right. The Environmental Protection Agency released technically four rules, but all kind of geared toward the same thing, essentially reducing the pollution that we get from coal and natural gas-fired power plants. Power plants in the United States are the same. second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but they're also big sources of air pollution and water pollution. And this is sort of a concerted effort to attack the problem from all sides. So federal officials say that these will lead to about $370 billion in public health benefits.

But the way they work is that the carbon dioxide regulations, they force the natural gas and coal plants to limit 90% or to account for 90% of their emissions, either through reducing it, through reducing how often they operate the plant or through technologies like carbon capture. Then there's a rule about mercury and toxic metals being emitted through the smokestacks. Then there's another rule about how much pollution they can put into wastewater. And then finally, there's a rule about coal ash waste. So, gosh, I've seen some of the firsthand impacts of coal ash and coal slurry. And that can be really devastating for those communities. So that sounds positive.

But I got to ask you, this sounds like the kind of thing that could face a bunch of legal challenges from, for instance, the power plants themselves. Are we expecting that? Oh, absolutely. Like, you may have been following, you know, the saga of the EPA's efforts to regulate power plants. This, you know, started back in under President Obama. He put out a rule called the clean power plan. That was blocked by the Supreme Court. Then one of the Supreme Court justices died. That plan was paused. And then Trump took over. He put out his own rule. Then that plan was paused. And so when President Biden took office, he had kind of a blank slate, but also several years behind schedule as far as being able to come up with these regulations. Now, the EPA is required by law to regulate greenhouse gas. emissions from power plants. But a lot of states say that these rules are picking winners and losers, or they'll say that, you know, this is an anti-coil legislation, whereas the EPA says that we're just looking at the output, the pollution. And if coal can't meet that standard, well, that's tough luck that, you know, we've been more than 100 years into our industrial revolution. And this is about time that we should be using better technologies.

Zooming out a bit, there's some slightly positive news about climate change trends. What's going on? Right. I talked to a few researchers, and they point. out that essentially the overall trajectory in greenhouse gas is basically the rate in which humans are burning coal, oil, and natural gas and pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, it's been level for a while, and now this year it may actually start to decline, that this is something that we've been waiting for for a very long time, and it's kind of a big change in the trend that we've seen, again, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As long as we've seen prosperity and wealth grow, we've seen emissions rise, and now we're seeing that relationship

of separate and potentially we're looking at a world where we can actually continue to improve people's lives while reducing emissions at the same time. Seeing that kind of a relationship decouple itself, that's a first. That does actually feel quite big. It does. And to be clear, at the country level scale, we've seen it happen already in a few different countries, including the United States. The U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have actually peaked in 2005 and have been kind of trending downwards in stops and starts while the U.S. economy has grown overall. But we're now likely to see this at a global level that basically every country in the world, including developing countries, are starting to see their

emissions level off while still continuing to grow their economies. And then the idea, the hope, is that eventually we will all continue to improve our welfare. We all emissions decline. The problem, though, is that the rate at which emissions are declining is still very slow, too slow to meet the current targets that we've set for ourselves as far as climate change goes. Right. The last thing I want to do is give the impression that we're good and our work is done here. That is absolutely not the case. So thank you for adding that context. So we've heard some worrying news from Voyager 1 over the last few months that NASA may be losing control over the spacecraft, but that changed this week. What happened?

Right. After five months, NASA engineers say that they have partially restored a computer on the Voyager 1 space probe. The space probe is now about 15 billion miles away from Earth right now. And it's kind of a pain to get in touch with it. It takes about 22 and a half hours each way for the signal to go there. But NASA scientists noticed last year that some of the signals they were getting from the space probe were gobbledygook. They couldn't make any sense of it. And so they were worried that they may have had some problem on the computer that was corrupted. But this is a computer that was built in 1977 before many of the engineers who were even working on it were born. And so they had to work with these very narrow constraints on trying to communicate with this device,

update it and fix the code in a way that they could start getting information from it. And this week they reported that they were able to partially restore some of the communication with this space probe. And now they hope that they can use that as a springboard to fix all the other problems on board. Okay. So I thought this next story was pretty interesting, in part because of the history and in part because of the impact this might have. A group of scientists made a point of declaring that more animals may be more conscious than

researchers previously thought. Right. Last week, there was this document called the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness and nearly 40 scientists signed onto it. And essentially what they're saying is that two things, that one, that more animals may fit our definition of consciousness than we may have realized. And two, that our definition of consciousness should actually be a lot broader. In recent years, we've seen some interesting findings that, you know, things like insects, like bees, they can play, apparently for fun. There are fish that can recognize themselves in the mirror. And we've also more critically seen other animals respond and react to pain. We've even seen some mollusks like respond positively to antidepressants.

And so it sort of indicates that they are willing and able to sort of process the world in a much more sophisticated way than many scientists have previously given them credit for. The consequence of that, though, is that, well, one, how are we treating these animals? what obligations do we owe to animals that are conscious in terms of whether or not we're eating them, the kinds of environments we hold them in, and then also even in the natural world, what happens when you destroy an ecosystem or a habitat for an animal that has this higher level of consciousness? What obligations do we have to that? They didn't get into all of these questions, but it definitely starts laying the framework for having to address them. Yeah, absolutely. And with so many challenges in courts having to do with personhood and whether animals should, non-human animals should have personhood, I feel like this is the kind of thing that's going to come up in a lot of courts as well. Right. This is going to be probably the basis for a lot of legal challenges to, you know, animal agriculture and maybe even pets. But also, you know, we've been

talking a lot about AI and about the question of AI consciousness. And it seems like we're jumping the gun there a little bit if we're not willing to extend that consciousness, you know, distinction to animals and jumping straight to computers there. This might actually help clarify how we do that with artificial life forms as well. All right. Thanks for bringing us those stories. Umair, it's really nice to talk to you again. I appreciate that. Thank you, Ariel. Great to talk to you as well. Umair Urfan is a senior correspondent at Vox. If you live in a coastal place like I do, there may be a nagging thought at the back of your mind. What if there's an earthquake and then a tsunami. Tsunamis are scary because they can happen really fast and every minute counts when

you're trying to get to higher ground. So having an early warning system in place really could save lives. One promising way to detect tsunamis as early as possible is the use of underwater cables tapping into existing telecommunication cables that crisscross the bottom of the sea. And Portugal, which was hit by a pretty famous tsunami in 1755, is about to be the test site for this project. Joining me now to talk about this is the chair of the UN's Joint Task Force on Smart Subsea Cables. Dr. Bruce Howe, research professor in Ocean and Resources Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Howe, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for being here. So explain to me how this early warning system works. It's my understanding that there's a wide underwater network of telecommunications cables. That's how we get our internet. And they're already there. But the idea behind this project is to take these cables and make them part of this system. So how is that going to work? Well, the basic idea is to integrate underwater sensors into new cables that will be deployed over the next years and decades.

There are between 1 and 2 million kilometers a cable out there now, operational, and is always being replaced about 10% per year. And so there's plenty of opportunity to do this. Okay, so tell me about these cables. What kind of technology is going to be integrated into these cables? There'll be three sensors for temperature, ocean bottom pressure, and seismic motion. So for tsunami purposes, it's really the pressure that measures the actual in-water wave of the tsunami. And then the seismic sensor actually measures typically the earthquake that causes the tsunami and provides early warning from the earthquake point of view as well. Okay, so in a nutshell, how could these boosted cables detect tsunamis and earthquakes early?

Yeah. So in Cascadia, the expectation is that the earthquake, the big earthquake that will come at some point, is about 100 kilometers offshore on that order. And so if the cable is close to that, or closer than 100 kilometers, it's closer than any shoreside instrument. and therefore it can give faster warning of any event it detects. And if the cable is still closer to the trench, the subduction zone trench that causes the earthquake, it can give significantly more early warning. So let's just say there's an earthquake. Tell me what the cable will detect and at what point it'll go, okay, I got to send out a ping like this is bad.

Well, the data comes to shore in real time instantaneously effective. But the first indication is one type of earthquake wave called a P wave, and that propagates relatively quickly. So it take, for instance, 20 seconds, let's say, to get to shore. And so this could detect it, you know, within a few seconds and give that early warning. And then the next wave that comes in is a sheer wave it's called. And that actually produces most of the damage. And that travels more slowly and would reach.

and would reach shore in a minute or so. So that's the first indication. And then at the same time, obviously, the movement of Earth will create a water wave, and that travels much slower, and it would take on the order of 20 minutes, let's say, to get to shore. So there's both like a minute or so extra warning for earthquake purposes,

and then on the order of 20 minutes or so, for the tsunami wave. Okay. And what kind of improvement is that compared to how we currently do things? Well, right now there are only a couple of dark buoys offshore. These are buoys with bottom pressure sensors, but no seismic sensors. And they're, I'm not sure, two or three just off Washington, Oregon. So they're very sparse and somewhat farther offshore. In the case of Oregon and Washington, there is already a scientific cable system there called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. And there are some seismic and pressure sensors out there, but they're not really connected in an operational sense yet. Okay. So this is really going to be sort of a different way of

doing things. This is a big leap forward in your mind? Yes, because the main thing is it's coupling the scientific and early warning aspects with commercial telecom cables. And so, yes, we're hoping and working towards having a cable offshore, Washington, Oregon, probably one that goes to Japan, for instance, and goes by the pollution trench, which generates really big earthquakes and tsunamis. The overall goal of the project is to have global distribution, not just off the U.S. And so it's only affordable through joining forces with the telecom industry and writing piggyback basically on their cables. Got it. And, you know, this really is an international project, right? It's starting. The pilot project is happening in Portugal. Why Portugal? Tell me about that.

Well, I mean, the fundamental reason was they had an old cable that was getting too old, both technically and end-of-life kind of thing. 25 years. And so they had to replace it. And so the regulatory agency of Portugal for telecommunications was tasked with the job of planning this. And from the very first day, the director mandated that it shall have environmental sensing and what they call seismic detection because of the 1755 earthquake. So from the very start of the project in 2018, the planning, it was. a smart cable. Got it. Right. Because what happened in 1755 really was devastating for Lisbon, right? Lisbon and the whole coastline of Portugal and Spain and North Africa as well.

So when it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis, what can a few extra minutes do in terms of helping people survive? The saying is, with the earthquake, you duck under a table to protect yourself, you know, for the minute or so of the earthquake, hopefully only that long, maybe several, but survive long enough so that then you can run uphill, presumably you know a tsunami evacuation route, and or go up vertically if you're in a building that's suited for that purpose. So that's the main thing is give you time to save your own life during the earthquake phase and then take action to escape. Get to higher ground. Exactly.

Right. Right. So it really is imperative that we have a better system in place. Yes. Are there other specific parts of the world where these smart cables could be most useful? You know, what regions of the world are most at risk for tsunamis? Wherever the subduction zones occur, where ocean crust dips down under a continent, typically. So it's the whole Pacific room of fire from southern Chile all the way up around our West Coast allusions, down past Japan, and all the way down to New Zealand and even Antarctica, you could say. So those are the main regions where large earthquakes occur and resulting tsunamis as well. Got it. And so the goal really is to make this a world.

network. Yes, and it's not just for earthquake and tsunami early warning, but it's also for climate. So there's temperature measurements and the pressure is a measure of ocean circulation as well. So it's very important from a climate perspective as well. So what are the hurdles to installing more of these boosted cables around the world? It seems sort of like a no-brainer to get them everywhere and at the same time I would imagine that there's a cost and because this is an international project I don't know who's paying for this so you know how hard is it to make this stuff happen well we've been at it 14 years so and we're having our first successes now yes money is is the main issue for Portugal it's it's all government funded but with support from the European

Union the total projects around 150 million euros and the European Union is putting in 40 million for connectivity purposes. And then there's a second system going in roughly the same time called Tam Tam between Van Atu and New Caledonia. And there the French government is supporting a large portion of it. And then commercial companies is putting in the rest. So if it's proven that the project in Portugal works well, do you think other countries will show more interest and also get on board and be willing to pay for this? We, we, we expect Great things from those two projects, setting precedents and demonstrating, you know, that there are many problems. There's money. There's technical proof. There's permitting issues,

legal issues, security issues. And so these first two address many of those concerns and will set valuable precedents. I do want to ask you one question here. When an earthquake gets detected and then, you know, there's an idea, okay, there could be a tsunami here. how do I, as an average resident of a coastal area, how do I then get that message? Well, in the United States, there is a warning system. And in many places... You mean like the Amber Alert system, right? Those emergency type messages that you get on your phone.

Exactly. And sirens, I mean, here in Hawaii, we have sirens all over. And I think along parts of Oregon, Washington, there are all. also sirens. And there's a program called tsunami ready. So there are training exercises or in public schools, for instance. You know, they actually do an evacuation. How will things work in Portugal? They have the same thing in place, too. So they have a early warning system in place and it'll be augmented. And hopefully, you know, this will catalyze more investment to make it even better. Got it.

Okay. You've been working on smart cable technology for decades now. So much of your life has been dedicated to this. What's it like to finally see it coming to fruition in Portugal? Well, it's wonderful. I was just there last week, and I think everyone is really enthusiastic, and they're really gearing up to implement it. And also, they recognize that they are the first adopters

and have a responsibility to demonstrate to the rest of the world and take a leadership role in this to try and promote it elsewhere as well. All right. Well, I wish you luck. That's all the time we have for now. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated this conversation. Thank you. I appreciate it. Dr. Bruce Howe, research professor in ocean and resources engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And that's all the time that we have for now. On Monday, we'll talk about the wild and wondrous world of silk.

But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend.