ActiveRemediation

Abernethy, Jacob; Chojnacki, Alex; Farahi, Arya; Schwartz, Eric M.; Webb, Jared

doi:10.1145/3219819.3219896

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…For consistency with house inspection data, only the material listed on the customer or private side of the SL was used as city records. Although the original data file does not include distinct entries for private (curb stop to the home) and public (curb stop to water main) SLs, the following approach developed by Abernethy et al (2018) was adopted: (1) Whenever a single material was listed (92.3% of parcels), this material was assigned to both types of SL, (2) for the remaining 4310 tax parcels where two materials were listed, such as "Lead-Copper" (4004 parcels out of 4310), the first label, for example, lead, was used as material for the private SL. The other most frequent double records were "Lead-Tubeloy" (n = 41), "Copper-Tubeloy" (n = 28), "Copper-Zinc" (n = 21), and "Lead-Zinc" (n = 14).…”

Section: Datasets Used To Build the Geospatial Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since early 2016, Flint has hired private contractors to excavate and inspect SLs at private residences and replace the ones made of lead or galvanized material, an initiative known as the Flint Fast Action and Sustainability Program (FAST Start). According to Abernethy et al (2018), these residences were selected based on several factors that evolved overtime: (1) the presence of high water lead levels, pregnant women, children under 6 years old, as well as veterans and the elderly, (2) the output of a ML model that uses utility and parcel-level data to calculate the probability of presence of LSL and GSL, (3) political and logistical constraints (e.g., lower implementation cost of a block-by-block excavation strategy), and (4) selection of statistically representative samples when possible. Because the main focus was still on lead discovery, the actual home selection process is biased (i.e., relative to the larger city-wide inventory, SL with hazardous material were selected more frequently), although simulations using randomized datasets led to results that were nearly equivalent to the ones obtained for actual datasets (Abernethy et al, 2018).…”

Section: Excavation Data Used To Validate the Geospatial Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such classification algorithms are, however, unable to handle heterogeneity related to geographic location and similarity of homes. To address this limitation, Abernethy et al (2018) incorporated the ML predictions as parameters to prior distributions in a hierarchical Bayesian spatial model with conditional autoregressive structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geospatial model of composition of water service lines in Flint,Michigan: Validation using excavation data and a new compositional geostatistical approach

Goovaerts¹

2023

AWWA Water Science

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Following the Flint drinking water crisis, a service line (SL) replacement program was implemented to replace lead SLs and galvanized SLs connecting residences to Flint's water system, leading to the excavation and inspection over a 5‐year period (2016–2020) of a total of 26,750 lines, representing close to 50% of all tax parcels in the City of Flint. These recent data were used to validate an earlier geospatial model created by residual indicator kriging (IK) to predict the probability that a home has a lead, galvanized, or copper private‐side SL based on neighboring house inspections (i.e., 3254 homes visited in 2017) and secondary information (i.e., built year and city records on SL composition). Receiver operating characteristic curves indicated an average frequency of detection (i.e., area under the curve [AUC]) of 0.9 for copper and galvanized material and 0.6 for lead service lines. Predicting the composition of SL at unmonitored residences by IK, however, can result in negative probabilities of occurrence and probabilities that do not sum to 1. These limitations were overcome by adopting simplicial IK, whereby data undergo a logratio transform before the geospatial analysis. This first application of a compositional approach to SL data improved the detection of lead SLs (AUC = 0.8 vs. 0.6) while providing coherent predictions. Incorporating secondary information, in particular using standardized cokriging and a new rescaled cross‐semivariogram estimator introduced to correct for geographical clustering of house inspections, increased the accuracy of the prediction.

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Section: Datasets Used To Build the Geospatial Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Excavation Data Used To Validate the Geospatial Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geospatial model of composition of water service lines in Flint,Michigan: Validation using excavation data and a new compositional geostatistical approach

Goovaerts¹

2023

AWWA Water Science

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“…A large portion of this money went toward replacing the city's lead and galvanized steel service lines, a process begun in early 2016 and nearly complete at the end of 2019. Although this pace has put Flint in a position to eliminate its lead‐based infrastructure faster than any other American city in history, the process has not been without delays and controversy, particularly over the use of a computer algorithm to predict the locations of lead service lines (Abernethy, Chojacki, Farahi, Schwartz, & Webb, ; Chojnacki et al, ). Other funds have been directed to nutritional programs aimed at mitigating the effects of lead on the body, as well as a variety of health care, educational, and social services (Ruckart et al, ).…”

Section: Response To the Flint Water Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

The Flint water crisis

Pauli

2020

WIREs Water

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The Flint water crisis is one of the most significant environmental contamination events in recent American history. In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, while under the control of an emergency manager appointed by the governor, switched its drinking water supply from Lake Huron water treated and distributed by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. Failure to treat the water properly at the Flint Water Treatment Plant led to a variety of problems with water quality and public health. Low chlorine in parts of the water system fostered bacterial growth and contributed to an historic outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 2014-2015. High levels of trihalomethanes brought the city into violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act in late 2014. Finally, systemic lead contamination-revealed through a collaborative sampling effort by local activists and engineers in the summer of 2015resulted from corrosive water eating into lead pipes and other lead-bearing components of Flint's water infrastructure. In October 2015, after considerable public pressure, the city switched back to Lake Huron water. Efforts by federal, state, and local officials to respond to the crisis have focused on restoring water quality, repairing and replacing dangerous and damaged pipes, and addressing public health needs. At the popular level, residents and activists have continued to fight for accountability, reparations, and restoration. A variety of causal explanations for the crisis have been put forward, some focusing on water treatment, regulation, and infrastructure, others on the political context created by state takeover of the city, and others on historical factors like structural racism, deindustrialization, and depopulation.

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“…USEPA did not report benefit and cost estimates for the 2000 LCR revision (USEPA, 2000a), so no inferences can be gleaned concerning the specific effect of the economic feasibility principle had it been adopted 9 . Abernethy et al (2018) addresses the high cost of simply determining where lead service lines exist and developing a cost-effective strategy for line replacement. The USEPA Science Advisory Board (2011) has raised concerns that service line replacement may increase rather than reduce risk.…”

Section: Effects Of Adopting the Economic Feasibility Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

Achieving Economically Feasible Drinking Water Regulation

Belzer¹

2020

J. Benefit Cost Anal.

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United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has regulated drinking water since the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Congress directed it to achieve three conflicting goals: (i) establish stringent nationwide standards, (ii) ensure that these standards are both technologically and economically feasible, and (iii) accommodate significant differences in cost among water systems of different sizes with different water sources. USEPA chose to emphasize goal (i) at the expense of (ii) and (iii). In 1986, Congress intensified its preference for (i), was silent concerning goal (ii), and criticized USEPA for failing to achieve goal (iii). In lieu of economic feasibility, the Agency substituted “affordability,” defined as expenditures up to 2.5 % of national median household income irrespective of the benefits. This imposed deadweight losses, and substantial inequities on rural areas, low-income communities, and low-income households generally. In 1996, Congress directed USEPA to use benefit-cost analysis positively and normatively. Regulations issued since 1996 do not appear to comply, however. A review of post-1996 drinking water standards indicates that most were certified by USEPA as having benefits that justified costs, but these determinations were unsupported by the Agency’s own regulatory impact analyses. This article proposes that USEPA define by regulation that “economic feasibility” means marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for the smallest water system subject to SDWA, and that all future drinking water standards must be economically feasible. Economic efficiency would be greatly enhanced and the pervasive inequities of “affordability” greatly diminished. Unlike “affordability,” this definition is objective and compatible with lay intuition about the meaning of key regulatory terms.

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ActiveRemediation

Cited by 17 publications

References 10 publications

Geospatial model of composition of water service lines in Flint,Michigan: Validation using excavation data and a new compositional geostatistical approach

Geospatial model of composition of water service lines in Flint,Michigan: Validation using excavation data and a new compositional geostatistical approach

The Flint water crisis

Achieving Economically Feasible Drinking Water Regulation

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