To Chester, With Love: Get a Grip!

What a heart-warming story.  (Until you think for a minute.)

At 3:30 last Sunday morning, while most of the city slept, Brian Warren and his father, James, boarded a van supplied by the Boys and Girls Club of Chester and drove more than 640 miles to Flint, Mich., with a precious cargo.

They delivered 170 cases of bottled water that had been collected from the residents of Chester to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Flint, Mich. — and then turned around and were back home by 11:30 Sunday night.

As far as the people of Flint were concerned, the 1,300-mile mission of mercy was accomplished just in the nick of time.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The residents of Flint no more need 170 cases of bottled water from Chester, Pa. than they need more Democratic politicians to misgovern their city.

The water crisis, such as it was, is over. And it was much overblown by the media. Kevin Drum at the ultra liberal Mother Jones admits as much.

There is no bottled-water shortage in Flint. City residents there can get - and are getting - all the bottled-water they want from much closer by than Chester, Pa.

And here is the ultimate - and sad - irony. When it comes to lead exposure - which is what everyone was so concerned about in Flint - Chester's children are at much greater risk.

Wrote Vox's Sarah Frostenson on Feb 3:

I spent the past week looking at these cities, and came away with three main findings. The first is that the rate of lead exposure in Pennsylvania is incredibly alarming. Nearly 10 percent of the more than 140,000 kids tested had levels of 5 or more micrograms per deciliter of lead in the blood (5 µg/dL) — this is the threshold the government uses to identify children with dangerously elevated blood lead levels. One percent tested positive for blood lead levels greater than 10 µg/dL.

Compare that to Flint, where state data shows the rate of lead exposure for 5 µg/dL from 2014 to 2015 as 3.21 percent. Other researchers have found that specific areas of the city have exposure rates as high as 6.3 percent. That's alarming, but still a lower rate than 18 of the 20 cities in Pennsylvania.

Here's the chart:

This group of 20 cities in Pennsylvania had an elevated blood lead level rate 22 percent higher than the state

Compare Flint's 6.3 exposure rate at the height of the crisis to Chester's 13.73. Granted, it isn't contaminated water but lead-paint dust that explains the difference but still. Maybe the kids of Flint should be sending surgical masks to the children of Chester. 

No doubt Brian Warren and his father are good, well-meaning people. But Chester has enough of its own problems. Its citizens don't need to go looking for non-problems to solve elsewhere.

This strike us as one of those stories published by the Daily Times to wade off the old criticism "You never print any positive stories about Chester."





The good news is that Chester, one of the poorest cities in the state, didn't make the list of having a higher percentage of kids with unacceptable lead levels in their bodies. The bad news is that nearby Philadelphia did. Flint, Schmint.

This is what happens when you don't dig a little deeper into the facts behind the news.