KILLER HEAT WAVE
Profits aren't drying up in drought
By G.
Dunkel
A drought and heat wave has socked the Northeast this
summer--from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, and as far west as
Ohio and Kentucky. It has also exposed serious and systematic
failures of the capitalist system here to deal with basic human
needs like water and shelter.
Air pollution has come along with the heat wave, mainly
because of the output of car and truck engines and electric
power generation trapped in the air mass holding the heat. This
pollution has a significant impact on the problems caused by
high temperatures.
Specialists claim the number of deaths due to heat is hard
to calculate. Along with direct heat exhaustion, heart attacks
due to the physical stress from higher than normal heat or
pollution also cause death.
On Aug. 3 the Associated Press reported that the heat had
caused 214 deaths in 20 states from July 19 to Aug. 2. That is
a low estimate, based on death certificates that list heat as a
cause of death.
Extreme callousness on the part of bosses makes any hard
situation worse. The owner of a southern New Jersey farm where
two migrant workers died of heat exhaustion could have given
the workers enough water--or even let them stop working in the
heat of the day.
The owners of New York's print and garment shops, which
mostly lack air conditioning, could let their workers go home
with pay in high heat.
Workers should not have to risk their lives to keep their
jobs.
Many apartment houses in the Northeast and Midwest aren't
wired for air conditioning. They were built when air
conditioning was a dream for almost everyone but the
plutocrats. In general, they were designed to keep heat in
during the winter, not to let air flow in the summer.
Chicago has community cooling centers and an emergency plan
for heat waves that encourages visits to elders without air
conditioning. This cut heat-related deaths in Chicago from 700
in 1995 to 100 in 1999.
Terry Levin, a Chicago city spokesperson, asserted that most
elderly victims didn't install air conditioning because they
couldn't afford it. He did not deny that every death due to the
heat is preventable.
Drought is a foreseeable crisis
It takes longer than a week, or even a few months, for 30
percent of the water in New Jersey reservoirs to vanish.
Scientists were predicting this drought over a year ago.
On the East Coast of the United States, droughts have
occurred roughly every eight to 10 years over the last century.
These droughts not only slash production on dairy and produce
farms. They lead to a sharp increase of wildfires that close
roads and destroy property in rural areas.
But a drought doesn't come from a natural dry cycle alone.
Unwise, wasteful water use and poor management also play
important roles.
Take New York's water system. The city's reservoirs are in
the Catskills, 150 miles from the city itself.
New York construction workers are in the process of
completing a third water tunnel. It is the biggest public-works
project in the United States. The first portion of Tunnel #3
opened a few months ago--costing around $5 billion and the
lives of 22 workers already killed while building it.
New York's first water tunnel went into service in 1917, the
second in 1937. These two tunnels will be flushed and inspected
somewhere around the year 2020, when Tunnel #3 is finally
completed. Any problem that currently exists in these pipes
will have to wait--20 years.
In New Jersey, a private water company serving 750,000
people had a problem July 13 when a gasket on a 78-inch line
that supplies 60 percent of its flow slipped. Customers were
told to boil their water as the company went to a much smaller
backup system that didn't provide enough pressure to some
communities to use fire hydrants.
This is the third time this pipe has sprung a leak since it
was installed in 1987.
It's very hard to plan a hydrologically connected area that
contains 20 million people--the New York metropolitan
area--when the companies and public water systems are split
into so many different competing entities, many of which are
too small to build the systems they really need. Even in the
distribution of a basic necessity like water, capitalism
engenders an anarchy of production.
The water restrictions that Pennsylvania, Delaware, some
communities in Massachusetts, Maryland and others have imposed
depend on people sacrificing their individual comfort and
belongings--like lawns, swimming pools and shrubbery--for the
common good. A bit of sacrifice now, the politicians' argument
goes, will preserve the water supplies needed for washing,
drinking, cooking, putting out fires and so on.
But these restrictions allow people and businesses with
their own, private wells, even if they are drawing from the
same aquifers as the water utilities, to use as much water as
they want.
According to a report in the Allentown, Pa., newspaper the
Morning Call, Perrier is still using the public water systems
in eastern Pennsylvania to produce its bottled water, like Deer
Park.
Perrier, owned by Nestle USA, a multi-billion-dollar
transnational corporation, sold about $1.3 billion in bottled
water last year. Ground water levels in eastern Pennsylvania
would have to drop very far before a billion-dollar company had
its production cut.
It's not just the big guys, however. H & K Distributors
of Harrisburg, Pa., has just six tankers that it runs 24 hours
a day. It pays $19.36 to fill up a 6,500-gallon tanker to
deliver water to swimming pools that need to be topped off--and
charges $165 to $185 per tanker load, depending on the distance
it has to travel.
The capitalists exploit the innate solidarity workers feel
for each other and their generosity confronting a social crisis
to make a profit. Perrier and its owner Nestle have no
intention of cutting back on their water consumption since that
would mean cutting back on their profits.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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