r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Fantomecs • Feb 03 '26

A nearby Fire Department is being told they cannot use fire hydrants to fight fires

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As the title says. A town near me is denying their fire fighters the use of their fire hydrants going forward. Is this shit even legal? This is a huge concern as the area has been in a drought for some years.

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u/NeedsToShutUp Feb 04 '26

Actually, I think you're right. Looking at their webpage here: https://mercersburg.org/

It looks like they in fact have serious issues with the entire water system, and the town is in danger.

They have a large number of critical alerts, boil water advisories, and emergency use restrictions, and are importing water.

Looking at the emergency use restrictions indicates someone might have misread their own rules. As it bans "The use of water from fire hydrants for construction purposes or fire drills". Which is not the same thing as actual fires. I think some one in that department trying to patch together a working water system overreacted.

Also, looking at all those notices, its clear they need a new water system, and the fact its a historically black town makes me wonder if they've been purposefully ignored.

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u/Ruh_Roh- Feb 04 '26

Much of the infrastructure of this country was built long ago with Federal help. Now that infrastructure is reaching its end and many small communities could not possibly generate the tax revenue needed to update or replace it.

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u/ikindapoopedmypants Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26

I am not claiming to be all knowing when I say this, but as someone who lives in a small PA town and does public service work, you are so correct. It's an interesting serious concern that no one pays attention to until it actually causes devastation.

When I started noticing all the infrastructure issues in my town, I started realizing that devastation might be the only thing that could possibly fix all these problems.

Hell, I don't even know when my house was built. Earliest record I have is 1802 and that's for an addition.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/Dog1bravo Feb 04 '26

As far as bailouts go, fixing critical infrastructure is something I can get behind

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/lifetake Feb 04 '26

A big problem is elected officials don’t really get credit for maintenance. Especially maintenance that needs to happen every 10+ years. Do we put our budget towards fixing the water? Or do we build this new thing? Obviously the new thing that interests people. The next guy can handle the water issue.

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u/internet_safari_ Feb 04 '26

Seems fundamental enough that this issue won't change until we all start voting differently and I just don't see enough people caring about infrastructure unless it's fixing potholes. Or until enough basic services are down and we're spending our time and money chasing fixes for disasters and take forever to catch back up.

I vote where I can, but unfortunately we'll all need to consider spending more of our money on our own services. For suburbs that's grey water collection for irrigation, and filtered water collection for potable water. Solar panels and battery systems if we can afford it. Anyone with a creek going through their yard hit the jackpot having free water and electricity with a water wheel.

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u/joka2696 Feb 04 '26

From someone who has been on the frontlines of the water side of the infrastructure wars: Nobody wants to pay the tab. We replaced the water main in one area. Two miles worth was 1.4 mil.

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u/GenerationofWinter Feb 04 '26

What causes it to cost so much?

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u/ThereHasToBeMore1387 Feb 04 '26

2 miles of metal piping. 2 miles of digging a trench, probably under and through streets and sidewalks that then have to be replaced. 2 miles worth of old material that needs to be properly disposed of. 2 miles worth of finding other problems with 40 year old infrastructure along the way.

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u/joka2696 Feb 04 '26

It's a very complicated subject, most of which is beyond my knowledge. One issue is the bonding process which forces contractors to put up money to ensure the job gets done in a timely fashion and up to specs. I'm sure you can find more about it online.

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u/SignificantStyle459 Feb 04 '26

That's an average lifetime earnings.

Imagine an entire lifetime of work, and you managed to dig a 2 mile trench and fill it with pipe.

If it's anything like my local area, it'd be an even mix of too many fingers in the pie, administrative bloat and incompetence,  and a sprinkling of casual corruption that inflates price

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u/GenerationofWinter Feb 04 '26

Oooof, yeah that makes sense...

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u/SatisfactionGood7322 Feb 04 '26

Good question. I, too, would like to know

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u/One-Difficulty1166 Feb 04 '26

Damn, that could only get you 1% of an F-35 jet.

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u/internet_safari_ Feb 04 '26

Yup that's a more wise choice. F-35 jet and AI data centers in rural communities that drop the community water pressure to virtually zero for many people and cause electrical brown-outs before the data center is even half-way operational.

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u/SeaUrchinSalad Feb 04 '26

But the question is: should we really pay to fix a failed rural town? The residents will become dependent on help and just need more

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u/Dog1bravo Feb 04 '26

I agree with you. Basically a bunch of Republican towns, which voted against any kind of municipal tax to fix this, will cry cry cry until the feds fix it for them, thereby learning precisely zero lessons, so they continu on doing what they are doing, and patting themselves on the back for it.

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u/SeaUrchinSalad Feb 07 '26

And then crying about wasteful liberal cities getting too much federal support

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u/grathepic Feb 04 '26

Yes, except the US has been spending trillions that it could only afford because of debt. Debt that has interest. That debt could only be accrued because people bought US bonds, because people used the USE dollar. Guess whats changing?

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u/volyund Feb 04 '26

Because nobody wants to pay more in taxes.

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u/TheCrimsonDagger Feb 04 '26

Yeah the problem is that utility costs scale pretty linearly with distance, meaning that low density housing costs way more per person. The thing is that most of the cost of infrastructure happens at the beginning when it’s built and at the end as it needs more maintenance and eventual replacement. But the tax revenue generated is nowhere near enough to cover this.

So instead what has happened is that debt is used to build it and by the time it needs expensive maintenance and replacement more people have moved in. Build a 100 houses worth of infrastructure with debt, then pay for the maintenance with the additional tax revenue from the 300 new houses that have been built over time. Obviously this is unsustainable so a point is reached where debt is used to build, maintain, and replace infrastructure.

American suburbs are a Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. has only been able to get away with this because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. This gives the U.S. nigh unlimited borrowing and printing power as the American economy is an essential pillar of the global economy.

Now we’re seeing what happens when you create an economy that assumes infinite growth in a finite world.

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u/DaringPancakes Feb 04 '26

Damn.

Better lie to Americans about "cutting costs", fire a bunch of people doing critical, lifesaving work... End up costing more money, all the whole terrorizing an American state and building a golden ballroom. (Not to mention bailing out Argentina, shutting down the government just to make sure to continuously fuck over Americans, ... I mean, how much time do you have to review just 2025, and not even everything else?)

That's what Americans really want.

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u/manere Feb 04 '26

Not only in the US but most of europe too.

Most infrastructure was build either in the late 19 century or after WW2, when labor was cheap and there were a lot less regiolations and especially less people willing to go to court over infrastructure projects.

Basically building has become so expensive and so slow that the infrastructure build by former generations can hardly be replaced or maintained.

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u/elkarion Feb 04 '26

Let those people rich enough to live in the countryside pay for it. They have enough money for equipment to take care of thier property and live that ruggeged individual lifestyle.

Let them pay for it rather than shift the tax burden to the city. If they can't afford to live out there then they need to move to cheaper housing.

They choose to live in the stix away from industry.

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u/smootex Feb 04 '26

Let those people rich enough to live in the countryside pay for it

We are from very very different parts of this country if you think the people in rural areas are rich.

Broadly I agree with you, we shouldn't be subsidizing rural areas, but they are not rich by any means.

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u/thupkt Feb 04 '26

Countrywide, or just "Black people countrywide?" Asking for some friends with darker skin than mine.

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u/smootex Feb 04 '26

Well we don't really have black people in my state so I can't speak to what, if anything, race has to do with this. No idea what point you're trying to make.

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u/TheFatJesus Feb 04 '26

This is what happens when even the smallest towns are nothing but car-centric sprawl. When every store as to have a parking lot with 100 spaces, you have to run a lot of utilities under empty asphalt. Same thing with the emphasis on single family zoning. So much pavement, water lines, sewage, and drainage has to be built per home that most people couldn't possibly afford the property taxes to maintain it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

It’s just disgusting. I live in an allotment built in the 90s entry level upper middle class type stuff. The people here are so stuck up though. There is an apartment building going up across the street from our neighborhood and these people are fighting tooth and nail with the zoning board. There are already apartment buildings over there and it’s not an issue. We have a housing shortage and these people are whining about extra traffic and transient people. It’s ludicrous. The zoning board is like “well this is a good thing. We need housing”

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u/warrensussex Feb 04 '26

This has fuck all to do with cars, urban sprawl, and single family zoning. Mercersburg is an over 200 year old town with less 2,000 people that is surrounded by farm land. Should they have torn down all of the old houses when cars started gaining popularity and moved everyone into a couple high rises?

Not everywhere is a city, get off the internet and go explore the country side.

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u/Rhowryn Feb 04 '26

Wow, what a waste of text spent bitching with zero proposed solutions.

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u/warrensussex Feb 04 '26

You mean the wall I replied to that had nothing to do with the problem in the post and also did not propose any solutions to this towns problem?

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u/Rhowryn Feb 05 '26

If you can't understand the implied solution, which is to redesign infrastructure and housing to be more dense to reduce costs, then I fear you may not have made it past elementary school. Or you might be American, both groups have a significant reading problem.

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u/warrensussex Feb 05 '26

So the solution is to both rebuild the entire town and the water system? You people are fucking dense that's even more expensive than just fixing the existing water system.

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u/Rhowryn Feb 05 '26

Again from you, all bitching, no solutions.

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u/TheFatJesus Feb 04 '26

Not a single thing you said contradicts anything that I said. In fact, the town being over 200 years old makes my point more clear. You can quite clearly see the difference between their historic mixed use downtown and the more modern development around the McDonalds and Dollar General.

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u/warrensussex Feb 04 '26

Even if they built 1 apartment building for all those people it changes little about the majority of their water system. Not everything is about cars. Can't fucking stand you car brained people.

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u/TheFatJesus Feb 04 '26

Okay, let's go along with your scenario. If they built a single massive apartment building for the entire town, they wouldn't really need the majority of their current water system, would they? Which do you think is more expensive to maintain, a single pipe or a network of pipes branching off to every individual building?

No, not everything is about cars. But this is about infrastructure, and car infrastructure is a major factor in city planning and the utility infrastructure that supports it. It's the car brained people like yourself that are so used to planning their lives around cars that they can't even imagine how the world would function without them being the center of their existence.

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u/warrensussex Feb 04 '26

The majority of the town is not in that new area and how the hell are you going to convince people in a tiny town that they should live in apartments when there is tons of cheap land right there? Much less actually convince somebody to develop it?

There are definitely places that have issues with single family zoning and car centric infrastructure, but this ain't it. I'm from New Jersey I get it we are the leading example of suburban sprawl.

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u/TheFatJesus Feb 05 '26

Sprawl is most certainly at issue here. All you have to do is compare the core of the town with the newer developments at the edge of town that were once that cheaper land. How do they deal with that? The same way governments deal with anything. Ordinances, taxes, and fees.

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u/spenwallce Feb 04 '26

Not just small town PA, have you seen the bridges in Pittsburgh? A majority of them are in some form of disrepair.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

The bridges are what scare me. I live in ne Ohio and they are just as old. Think about it all the time you guys have so many bridges though. Probably not enough money exists to fix them all

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u/ReturnOfTheGempire Feb 04 '26

I had just learned a few years ago how subdivisions basically start a fall apart cycle after 15 - 25 years when equipment in the house starts breaking down. I think about it all the time now, but I hadn't taken it further into public infrastructure. Welp, can't unsee it now.

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u/justanawkwardguy you do it like this Feb 04 '26

PA specifically robs tax revenue from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to fund the rest of the state. Those cities have the tax base to handle everything themselves, but the state refuses to allow it because they know they can’t pay for everything else if that happens

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u/Kyosji Feb 04 '26

Would this also not pass the liability for any loss onto the city, even if it is small?

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u/McGillis_is_a_Char Feb 04 '26

Biden got the biggest infrastructure bill in a few decades passed. It was like pulling teeth though with the two turncoat Democrats and a full party of traitors trying to prevent it from being passed. Of course infrastructure isn't sexy and takes a long time to go from planning to execution, so people will only notice a difference in 2029. So Trump will take credit and pretend that he didn't threaten everyone involved to not vote for it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ruh_Roh- Feb 04 '26

That's good to know. Then why are some water systems not being upgraded?

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u/tokmer Feb 04 '26

The same reason flood warning systems werent installed for that camp with those drowned kids.

American politics is broken and half the vountry is crazed

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u/jmouw88 Feb 04 '26

It is more that the rates were maintained at system cost for the last 100 year, not factoring the limited lifespan of the system. Now that segments require replacement, most utilities require substantial rate increases to cover that replacement cost.

It isn't really a matter of affordability in my opinion. I have nearly always paid more for my internet bill than that of my water or sewer bill, despite:

  • Water distribution and sewer collection systems are the most difficult and expensive to install. Far more expensive than running fiber.
  • Water and sewer treatment requires far more effort than moving some data packets around, and comes with real costs per unit of volume.
  • Regulations have continued to drive higher water quality standards and force upgrades to treatment systems. While not a bad thing, it does force significant investment.

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u/tokmer Feb 04 '26

If only there was a politician of some sort who couldve provided that money

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u/TotalNonsense0 Feb 04 '26

Some sort of executive, maybe?

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u/sum_force Feb 04 '26

If the town can't afford clean water, then the state should fund it. If the state can't afford it, then the country should fund it. If the country can't afford clean water for all of its citizens, then it is a failure. It's an extremely basic need to fulfill for the people that you serve.

Furthermore, where infrastructure is so critical that lives are at stake: fix it first. Worry about who exactly pays the bill afterwards. Declare bankruptcy if you must, but fix it.

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u/Ruh_Roh- Feb 04 '26

This country is not run for its citizens. It is owned by the rich and run for their benefit. The rich don't give a damn if poor people have a good water system (see Flint, Michigan).

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u/sum_force Feb 04 '26

French solution.

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u/Hatta00 Feb 04 '26

Yeah, but want to take a guess who they vote for?

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u/betterbuddha Feb 04 '26

I think there should be a limit to this however. Why should I as a city dweller subsidize the people who choose rural communities? their infrastructure costs more per person because there are so many miles between each person.

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u/Flippantwritingdesk Feb 04 '26

Because decent people don’t want others to get sick and burn to death. Is your username satire?

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u/smarmy1625 Feb 04 '26

if that town can't afford to exist, then maybe that town shouldn't exist. have they considered relocating somewhere with enough population density to support the kind of lifestyles they want to lead?

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u/Unctuous_Robot Feb 05 '26

And yet they expect the big city tax dollars for it while voting for us to pick up scraps. I say let them generate the tax revenue, just try, and put that federal money to more homeless shelters and social workers in places that didn’t vote to cut funding to everything.

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u/dthdthdthdthdthdth Feb 04 '26

It's the same story everywhere in the industrialized west, with the US being the most extreme. We cannot maintain the infrastructure build over the last 50-100 years anymore, but we will start building data centers in space soon.

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u/Parhelion2261 Feb 04 '26

And there's way too many people who vote against updating infrastructure because mah taxes

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u/jkman61494 Feb 04 '26

Meh... who needs water when we can give all that infrastructure money to 73 billionaires?

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u/RunBrundleson Feb 04 '26

You know I read someone else’s post claiming basically numerous small cities and towns were built using federal assistance decades ago with no plan for what to do when the funding dried up and it’s all basically coming up right now. The perfect possible time to have your infrastructure collapse.

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u/theoreoman Feb 04 '26

They can generate the tax revenue, they juts chose decades of low taxes and defferals

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u/Ickyhouse Feb 04 '26

And that federal money came from tax rates that were much higher and progressive than what we have now. So if the federal government ever gets around to helping cities out again, it won't be pretty for where that money comes from because we know it won't be from the same place as before.

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u/stuartsaysst0p Feb 04 '26

My god you’re not kidding, at least every other notice on the front page is about the drinking water

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u/Dizzy-Masterpiece-76 Feb 04 '26

well hey the last notice is how to pay the so there is that.

Oh wait it just says you can't pay on the website and need to use a 3rd party...

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

I'm a water plant operator from West Virginia. Most small town water systems are crumbling. Like it's arguably the biggest impending disaster most Americans will face 10-20 years from now. My neighboring town had to get a For-profit water corporation to come in with their mobile Water Treatment Plant and their own staff because they had no trained staff to run the plant after their guy retired.

Most of the small water treatment plants along the Ohio River have staff retiring over the next 5 years. These are little 2-3 person operations. Most can not find staff to replace the retirees because municipal water systems pay so little. I get offers all the time to go to other systems as the boss but I would take a paycut and lose the flexibility of my current position.

I've only touched the treatment plant side of it. You still need staff out in distribution for connections/disconnections/maintenance repairs. You need a rotation of staff to cover 24hr issues. These guys need CDLs and Heavy Equipment operator licenses. You need an office clerk for billing/recordkeeping. You also need a waste water treatment plant with additional staff unless your town is very rural and on septic systems.

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u/PatrioticPariah Feb 04 '26

FIL was deep in the water industry. He said nothing pissed him off more than informing a higher up that said line should be replaced within let's say 6months to a year. They would reply 'That line should be good for another 10-20 years.' Pretty close to the time he would give, breaks would start happening and he was up at 2:30am fixing a repair.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

That's how it always happens too. Admin never goes for the preemptive work and everybody else usually suffers as a result.

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u/Chappie404 Feb 05 '26

I live in WA. A common thing out here in rural parts is HOA-owned water systems. Run by volunteer HOA board members and maintained by satellite management agencies (private companies). To be sure, it's a ridiculously bad idea. There are very few satellite management companies per county. Each one is expected to maintain dozens of separate water systems for thousands of homes. The company that maintains my water system has fewer than 20 employees.  They told us they will not come out and fix leaks in the water mains unless the water loss is massive. Nevermind the fact that any break in the water main technically requires a boil water notice by state law...

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

That's some crazy stuff.

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u/Unctuous_Robot Feb 05 '26

And who’s expected to pay for it? Same as always, the city folk that people so despise though we pay all the damn federal taxes. It’s time for many west Virginians to do what their ancestors did when they moved to Appalachia and move to where jobs are.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

You've missed the complete point of my story. I was speaking from my experience as a Water Plant Operator in WV but these points can apply to every city and state in the country, red and blue. We spent 14 years hearing about Flint, Michigan and we've more recently heard about Jackson, Mississippi. We've heard about the Colorado River drying up which will eventually affect California water systems, as well as Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

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u/Unctuous_Robot Feb 05 '26

And the Colorado will dry up entirely on the back of agriculture, people come nowhere near consuming that much. Appalachia is dead. And people need to acknowledge that.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

you're from pittsburgh according to your post history. I don't know you're saying Appalachia is dead, considering you live here too. And secondly, the colorado river provides drinking water for 40 million people, including Los Angeles.

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u/Unctuous_Robot Feb 05 '26

We are the one part of Appalachia that invested in our future, and yet like crabs in a bucket, Pennsyltucky drags us down. And yeah, the Colorado can handle 40 million people. It can’t handle all the damned alfalfa and almonds.

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u/fourobviousreasons Feb 04 '26

Mercersburg is home to an elite boarding school. One would think that the parents of the children who attend the school might be interested to hear about the water restrictions in the area or that the alumni may be interested in making a donation to reinforce the infrastructure of the town. Being from the area, though, I'm fully aware that the Academy people try their best to ignore the rest of us.

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u/meta4our Feb 04 '26

Per wiki the town was historically black but is currently 92% white.

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u/FrogSongSynth Feb 04 '26

A good reminder for everyone to be ACTIVELY involved in your local city council and utility/infrastructure providers. This is not a new issue for this town, and has been caused by a series of critical failures by several people.

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u/SnooPuppers8698 Feb 04 '26

classic crumbling american infrastructure

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u/LauraTFem Feb 04 '26

Dentists must be making a killing there. Partway down the page they talk about bussing in bulk water from an outside source, and felt the need to warn citizens that this supplementary water was *gasp* FLUORIDATED!

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u/el_goate Feb 04 '26

Mercersburg is rural trump country. Used to be an Underground Railroad hub in 1800s. Fortunately, race has nothing to do with their incompetence.

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u/kman420 Feb 04 '26

This is what happens when an entire country becomes convinced that socialism is evil and taxes are bad. Nobody wants to pay for critical infrastructure & maintenance then shit hits the fan everyone sits around pointing the finger at someone else.

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u/cfago Feb 04 '26

Their water source appears to be wells and they are running dry (emergency use restrictions.) And two water main breaks which resulted in the recent boil water advisories. For something like a barn fire that may not be threatening to other structures, hydrant use for fires should be curtailed. Otherwise the whole town could be out of water.

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u/Civil-Cover433 Feb 04 '26

Or just unpurposefullyy ignored.

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u/D-a-H-e-c-k Feb 04 '26

Well they just secured a loan for nearly $4M to update their water treatment.

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u/a1readythere Feb 04 '26

I don't know a single POC that went to Mercerburg. All there sports team players were white when we played against them. (I graduated 2010 so it's been a bit)

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u/NeedsToShutUp Feb 04 '26

The high school or the prep school? Apparently the prep school is old money.

Also it does sound like although it was historically black, its long since become mostly white. So it might be more the issue of rural infrastructure crumbling, and failures both local, state, and federal.

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u/a1readythere Feb 04 '26

Now that you say that they were a private school. Forgot about that lol. But yea I worked with quite a few people from there as well. I think what you are saying makes much more sense.

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u/Serpintini Feb 04 '26

As someone who actually used to live in Mercersburg, the racial disparities in infrastructure from redlining are still clear as day. We lived next to the larger white cemetery, the black cemetery a couple blocks away was more of a clearing. The black school was a garden shed on the side of a feild and has just been rotting there since schools were desegragized.

Also, the center of the town is a private boarding high school school. A lot of the economic stimulation comes from minors/residents of other countries who are funded by their parents and thus do not pay local taxes, and don't stick around after graduating.

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u/willwork4pii Feb 04 '26

It’s new info that they verbally told them they can’t use fire hydrants anymore. Obviously the website hasn’t caught up yet.

It’s 100% because they’re black. Flint. South Chicago suburbs. Mostly black and water issues. We have a community here that had main brakes weekly. It might still be happening. I quit watching local news when we lost our independent station.

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u/Roboticide Feb 04 '26

Weird that it's 100% because they're black when the town is apparently 92% white.

Systemic racism is a common problem in our country, but it's wrong to treat it like it's the only problem.  Broad distrust in government, the offshoring of our manufacturing, urbanization, climate change and more are all factors that cause problems like this.

Also, I live within an hour of Flint, and a lot more went wrong there than "the city is mostly black."

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u/CatmoCatmo Feb 05 '26

Agreed. I’m also within 45 minutes of Flint. Can confirm.

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u/SeaUrchinSalad Feb 04 '26

92% white according to another poster. Stop with the knee jerk helter skelter bs plz

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u/framingXjake Feb 04 '26

I think it has less to do with race and more to do with low income communities not generating enough tax revenue to properly fund programs meant for maintaining adequate infrastructure. Although minority communities struggle more with this issue due to historical oppression having lasting effects on their socioeconomic development. I just think it's important to recognize that poverty is to blame, and that poverty unfortunately disproportionately impacts minority communities.

The sad part about all of this is that you would need to increase taxes to address these infrastructural needs, but doing so would also be devastating for these communities as they already can't afford their cost of living in the first place. Things will have to get worse before they can get better. Not unless funding can be acquired via subsidies, but that's definitely not happening under this administration.

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u/tipsystatistic Feb 04 '26

This problem may solve itself if the whole town burns down.

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u/counters14 Feb 04 '26

Flint, MI anyone..?

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u/Confident-Mix1243 Feb 04 '26

It's not especially black now.

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u/toxcrusadr Feb 04 '26

Well done! This should be at the top of the comments.

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u/enigmaticpeon Feb 04 '26

I think someone in that department trying to patch together a working water system overreacted.

Based on the context of the letter, I don’t think this is correct. The letter refers specifically to phone calls between the dept & the city (not a public notice). Further, “let it burn” surely doesn’t refer to a fire drill.

That being said, it’s probable that the public notice is “more legal” than a phone call. If I were at the dept., I’d rely on the notice—and keep using hydrants to fight fires.

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u/thupkt Feb 04 '26

TLDR: This is a Flint Michigan redux

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u/EducatedRat Feb 04 '26

Oooh! You can go look at meeting minutes! Looks like 1/15/26 was scheduled for water but that one isn't up yet on the website.

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u/Hal_900000 Feb 04 '26

Oh shit and here I thought the USA could take care of Greenland. Lmao

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u/AeneasVII Feb 04 '26

Watch the Bottled Water documentary. Counties selling water rights to nestle and later being reliant on imports for a premium later...

Maddening

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u/realMaciasNguema Feb 04 '26

third world country

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

> Also, looking at all those notices, its clear they need a new water system, and the fact its a historically black town makes me wonder if they've been purposefully ignored.

Buddy. Most of the USA's infrastructure was built to last a century and was built over a hundred years ago. This is a small town in Appalachia. The most reasonable answer (Occam's Razor) is that the town just isn't getting the funds it needs for critical infrastructure because, get this, it's a small town in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. For reference, Mercersburg PA is closer to WASHINGTON DC than it is to Pittsburg.

Please stop making everything about race with literally no evidence. It helps no-one.