a chelation that they can use to let lead out of their body. it s reserved for children with very high levels. for most of them the main point is just remove the exposure as soon as you can. the big question, i think, and the backdrop for all of this is how it ever reached this crisis point in newark in the first place, especially in light of everything we saw in flint, michigan, a few years ago. nick, you were part of a team at the new york times that really took a dive into this question over the weekend. we re going to talk about that in just a minute. nick and dr. torres are staying with us. coming up, more on the crtical lessons learned from the critical crisis in new jersey s biggest city. that s when the 11th hour continues. these folks don t have time to go to the post office they use stamps.com all the services of the post office only cheaper
water protested outside of the prudential center, the site of tonight s mtv music awards. earlier our own ron allen spoke to one resident about today s developments. they said today that they re going to replace the pipes, the bad pipes over the next 30 months. okay 30 months? that s a long time. yeah, i understand they can t do it overnight, but, come on, 30 months. it was going to be ten years? ten years? now they re speeding it up. okay, well that s still a long time. that is a long time. back with us tonight is knowledge native nick confessore and dr. john torres, medical correspondent for nbc news. nick, let s pick up on that reaction. i think when you hear just 30 months in isolation, 2 1/2 years, i think everybody says that s a really long time to fix this. you have the mayor there saying
those are houses that need to be tested. different sources are saying there could be hundreds of cities out there that have similar problems, maybe even worse problems. we just don t know about them yet. nick, very quickly, the mayor, given what you ve told us, given what you ve reported, what s his standing in newark right now? he s an incredibly popular mayor. up until this moment there hasn t really been much of a controversy, much of a scandal. he took over from cory booker who was pretty popular but as he left there were a few issues due to rising crime, budget cuts. there was some corruption at the watershed commission under him. up until now the mayor has been very popular. he s a very important ally of governor phil murphy. he s pretty well liked around the state which has surprised so many people to see how his messaging and handling of this issue has been in contrast to how we ve seen him run the city so far. it s a depress story in
if you were in 1 of those 14,000 or 15,000 households getting elevated lead levels of the water from the lead leaching to the pipes, that was not true. the mayor was trying to say the water source from the reservoir was not contaminated. that was true. but when it comes to what the residents were hearing and what was coming out of their faucets, there was a significant amount where the water was not safe to drink. you know, dr. torres, when you read nick s story and you think about how big this country is and how common political dysfunction is, and you have all these intermingling of agencies at different levels of government, we ve seen it in flint, we ve seen it in newark. are we likely to see this in other places? steve, i think we are because the infrastructure in this country has aged. it has a hard problem of trying to get that up to date and modernized. like you said, 1986 is when the standard came out saying anything after 1986 you cannot have lead pipes in the house. what
our guest nick shared a by line on the story. it reads, quote, an investigation by the new york times based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of public records reveals blunders at all levels of government in safeguarding newark s water infrastructure. city officials brushed aside warnings and allowed the system to deteriorate while state and federal regulators did not intervene often forcefully enough to help prevent the crisis. still with us, nick and dr. john torres. nick, so take us through this because the political response from the city of newark initially when there were indications began emerging was essentially there s no crisis here. and you also uncovered technically speaking what apparently happened to trigger this crisis in the first place. yeah, if you were to go back to 2015, it appears that that s when the city started tinkering with its water a little bit to deal with a problem with carcinogens, and to do that they started making their water slightly mo