Texas Government Covers Up Radiation in Drinking Water.10 Aug
The State of Texas has been lying to its citizens about the amount of radiation found in their water during state testing.
“It would be regrettable”. What the former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is referring to is the people who are getting cancers because of radiation in the drinking water that she decided not to inform them about.
Nuclear materials are some of the most dangerous materials known to man. Do we as a society have the social and governmental abilities to deal with these materials? Or, do we have a society where government agencies would mislead the public with test results that are deliberately made lower before being released to the public? If we can not handle these materials with the highest regard to safety, then the result will be tragedies of diseases like cancer and leukemia striking family after family.
A government that merely finds it “regrettable” that it fails in guaranteeing this safety is not the guarantor of safety that the citizens of this country require when we are talking about some of the most dangerous substances known to man.
One Response to “Texas Government Covers Up Radiation in Drinking Water.”
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Let me explain a bit about what this story is about.
Every measurement has with it a precision. Think of a ruler that is marked in increments of a quarter of an inch. When you measure something, you can probably estimate an eighth of an inch by where something falls between the marks. Since you are just eyeballing this, you can’t be completely certain beyond that, so one way of expressing this would be to say a measurement taken with that ruler would be ‘seven and three eighths inches, plus or minus one sixteenth of an inch.’
To an engineer or a scientist, the plus or minus part is inherent in every measurement, even if most of the time it isn’t written or said. After all, it becomes rather old to add “plus or minus 1/16th of an inch” to every measurement taken with a ruler.
What the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was doing was taking radiation measurements of water. Then they would look at those precision numbers that were reported as an inherent part of the measurement, and subtract them from the reading they were given. The TCEQ would then release this modified number to the public. So, if a radiation reading came back as “24 plus or minus 5″, they would tell the public that the reading was really 19. And, if environmental regulations required action at a reading of 20, they would not take that action using this number of 19 as their justification for not doing so.
The real reading was still of course 24 plus or minus 5. Which means it was most likely to be between 19 and 29, with the most probable answer being 24. Its as probable that the reading was really 29 as it was really 19. When you think of it in that manner, you see the lie inherent in just always saying it was 19.