relationship. the warmer you make the ocean surface temperatures, the more heat you re putting into the atmosphere, the more intense these storms can become. and we are seeing that intensification. professor michael mann gets tonight s last word, and that word is no to nuking hurricanes. thank you, professor. really appreciate it. thank you, lawrence. the 11th hour with brian williams starts now. tonight, president trump comes home after barreling through the g-7, locking horns with u.s. allies on trade, russia, and climate change. will it amount to anything? plus, in a move that could vet millions for trump s business, the president pitches his florida resort as the site of next year s g-7 using his farewell news conference to tout its abundance of parking. good news for the residents of newark, new jersey, whose water contains dangerous levels of lead but more waiting lies ahead as the the 11th hour on a monday night starts right nown
we are here to announce as i said earlier a $120 million investment made possible by the county improvement county to expedite the modernization of newark s drinking water and infrastructure at no cost to the affected homeowners. after weeks of controversy, officials in newark, new jersey, today revealed their $120 million plan to speed up the process of restoring clean drinking water. instead of ten years to replace lead pipes, officials now say it should take less than 30 months to replace about 18,000 service lines in new jersey s largest city. the proposal still needs the approval of county and city officials who are expected to hold meetings and to vote tomorrow. many newark residents have been relying on bottled water for weeks and tonight frustration is still growing. dozens of people demanding clean
in 30 months is giving skeptics hesitation. when you frame it like that, it looks like a significant development and it s one of the first bits of news and progression we ve seen in newark. we ve been talking about the city handing out bottled water and residents forced to rely on that. are residents going to have to stay with bottled water? they certainly hope not. all we know so far about the current bottled water distribution is that they have been testing for two weeks and will be testing for two more. they haven t updated us on what these tests are proving. we asked the mayor and he s going to wait until there s a scientific sample. right now they re working on getting the corrosion inhibitor in the water set. that takes up to six months. once that s set, in a worst case scenario, hopefully they won t need to use bottled water anymore. we won t know until the tests are done. we know instinctively you don t want lead in your water.
years newark has been combatting lead. it has these ancient old pipes and using sodium silicate to prevent the lead from reaching the water. when they made the water acidic to deal with one problem they rendered the sodium silicate ineffective. they never did a test before doing that. the state was unaware they were doing this. city officials couldn t produce any tests that showed when they were looking to change the acidity, they wondered what other impact it might have on the water. that s what started snowballing the effect from our report that brought us to 2017 when the first lead level exceedence first came to newark. that came to june, july of 2017, and the mayor was basically, his entire message was the water is completely safe to drink. don t worry here. there were legal things the city had to do, testing, mail anyone whose house turned to positive tests. those are random samples you don t extrapolate from. 18 months the entire message from the city was these are outrageously
this is a great triumph. why is that a fair framing of this? if you go back to march when they first broke ground on replacing the lead service lines, it was a $75 million bonding plan that was going to take ten years and cost residents up to $1,000 per household. that s a lot of money in a city like newark where the average median income is $34,000. fast forward to today, once the crisis has really accelerated, they were able to announce a new $120 million plan that was going to extradite it to less than three years. 18,000 pipes is a lot of pipes, so even the ability to do that in 30 months is giving some skeptics some hesitation. when you frame it like that, it looks like a significant development and it s one of the first bits of news and progression we ve seen in a long time in newark. we ve been talking about the city handing out bottled water and residents forced to rely on that. does that mean there are residents who for the next 2 1/2 years will have to stay with bottled w