Assignment- 3

1. Share details of a Case Study – origin, issues concerned, ongoing

/ present status.

• Flint is a city in Genesee County, Michigan, located about 66

miles northwest of Detroit. In 2011, the city was under the
control of a state-appointed emergency manager who made
the decision to switch the city's water source from the Detroit
Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to the Flint River, in
an effort to save money. The switch was made despite concerns
raised by residents and local officials about the safety of the
Flint River as a water source.

Issues Concerned:
• Almost immediately after the switch, residents began to
complain about the taste, odor, and color of the water, as well
as health issues such as rashes and hair loss. Despite these
concerns, state officials continued to insist that the water was
safe to drink.
• In 2015, a group of researchers from Virginia Tech University
tested water samples from Flint and found that the water was
contaminated with high levels of lead. Lead is a toxic metal that
can cause serious health problems, particularly in children,
including developmental delays, learning difficulties, and
behavioral problems.
• It was later discovered that the decision to switch to the Flint
River was made without properly treating the water to prevent
corrosion. The corrosive water caused lead to leach from the
city's aging pipes, contaminating the water supply.
Ongoing/present status:
• The Flint Water Crisis has had far-reaching consequences for the
community. Many residents continue to use bottled water for
drinking, cooking, and bathing, and have had to rely on outside
assistance for access to safe water. The crisis has also had significant
health impacts on residents, particularly children, who have been
exposed to high levels of lead in their drinking water.
• In 2016, a state of emergency was declared in Flint by the state of
Michigan, and federal aid was provided to help address the crisis.
Criminal charges were also brought against several officials involved
in the crisis, including the former emergency manager of Flint, as
well as officials from the Michigan Department of Environmental
Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency.
• In 2017, the state of Michigan reached a settlement with Flint
residents, agreeing to spend $87 million to replace lead pipes and
provide resources to address health and education issues related to
the crisis. However, many residents feel that the settlement is
inadequate and does not fully address the damage done to their
community.
• The Flint Water Crisis has also had broader implications, bringing
national attention to issues of environmental justice and the neglect
of low-income and minority communities. The crisis has led to
changes in legislation and policies aimed at preventing similar
 disasters in the future, including a law passed by the state of
Michigan in 2018 requiring all public water systems to replace lead
service lines by 2040.
• After the Virginia Tech researchers found high levels of lead in the
water in 2015, the state of Michigan finally admitted that there was a
problem with the water and began to take action. In October 2015,
the state switched the city's water supply back to the DWSD, but the
damage had already been done.
• The crisis drew national attention and sparked outrage among
activists, politicians, and celebrities. Protests were held in Flint and
across the country, calling for justice for the residents of Flint and
greater accountability for the officials responsible for the crisis.
• In addition to lead contamination, the water in Flint was also found
to be contaminated with other toxins, including bacteria and
chemicals such as trihalomethanes (THMs), which are byproducts of
water disinfection. The crisis has had a particularly devastating
impact on the city's children, who have been exposed to high levels
of lead in their drinking water. According to a study by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percentage of Flint
children with elevated levels of lead in their blood more than
doubled after the switch to the Flint River water.
• The Flint Water Crisis has also highlighted the issue of environmental
racism and the disproportionate impact of environmental disasters
on low-income and minority communities. Flint is a predominantly
African American city with a poverty rate of over 40 percent. The
decision to switch the city's water source was made by state officials
who were not accountable to the local community, and who ignored
the concerns of residents and local officials about the safety of the
Flint River as a water source.
Resolution:
• The resolution of the Flint Water Crisis has been a long and complex
process, involving legal action, public outcry, and government intervention.
Here are some of the key steps that have been taken to address the crisis:
1. Switching back to Detroit water: In October 2015, the state of
Michigan switched the city's water supply back to the Detroit
Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), which had been the
city's previous water source. This helped to address some of the
immediate health concerns associated with the Flint River water,
but it did not address the damage that had already been done
to the city's infrastructure.
2. Replacing lead pipes: One of the major issues that led to the
contamination of the water in Flint was the corrosion of the
city's aging pipes. In 2016, the state of Michigan began a
program to replace lead pipes in the city. The program is
ongoing, and it is expected to take several years to complete.
3. Providing resources for health and education: In 2017, the state
of Michigan reached a settlement with Flint residents, agreeing
to spend $87 million to replace lead pipes and provide
resources to address health and education issues related to the
crisis. This includes funding for health services for affected
residents, education and support for children who have been
exposed to lead, and the creation of a center for early
childhood development.
4. Holding officials accountable: Criminal charges were brought
against several officials involved in the crisis, including the
former emergency manager of Flint, as well as officials from the
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the
Environmental Protection Agency. In 2019, several of these
officials were convicted of crimes related to the crisis.
5. Changes in legislation and policy: The Flint Water Crisis has led
to changes in legislation and policies aimed at preventing
 similar disasters in the future. In 2018, the state of Michigan
passed a law requiring all public water systems to replace lead
service lines by 2040. In addition, the crisis has sparked a
national conversation about environmental justice and the need
for greater accountability and transparency in government.

Conclusion:
• The Flint Water Crisis is a tragic example of how neglect and
mismanagement of our public infrastructure can have devastating
consequences for communities. The crisis, which was caused by a
decision to switch the city's water supply to the Flint River without
proper treatment, resulted in widespread lead contamination and
other toxins in the water supply.
• While there have been steps taken to address the crisis, including
replacing lead pipes and holding officials accountable, many
residents of Flint still feel that the response has been inadequate.
The crisis has highlighted issues of environmental racism and the
disproportionate impact of environmental disasters on low-income
and minority communities
• Moving forward, it is important that we prioritize responsible
governance and the health and safety of our communities. This
means investing in public infrastructure, prioritizing transparency
and accountability in government, and working to prevent similar
disasters from happening in the future. The Flint Water Crisis serves
as a powerful reminder of the importance of these issues, and the
need to take action to address them.
Give specific examples of engineering ethics and if any
violations have been made
➢ The Ford Pinto:
➢ There was a time when most Americans would automatically sneer with
superiority when they saw the "made in Japan" label. The majority of
Japanese goods often have inadequate quality compared to their cost. Few
imports, the proud products of Yankee expertise, could actually compete
with their local equivalents. But by the late 1960s, a flood of goods from
outside had etched a few worry lines into the face of the American
business. As the Japanese, as well as the Germans, started to eat up an
increasing amount of the subcompact vehicle market, disquiet in Detroit
was quickly turning into panic.
➢ Ford Motor Company, never one to back down in the face of rivalry, made
the decision to confront the international challenge head-on. Ford officials
made the decision to manufacture the Pinto in 1968. The Pinto, nicknamed
"Lee's car" within the organisation in honour of Ford President Lee Iacocca,
was intended to weigh little more than 2,000 pounds and cost no more
than $2,000.
➢ Ford made the decision to shorten the typical time from the drawing board
to the showroom from three and a half years to two in order to have its
subcompact ready for the 1971 model year. Any design modifications that
are generally performed prior to production-line tooling would have to be
completed during the constrained timetable.
➢ Ford tested many prototypes in crashes before putting the Pinto into
production, partly to see if they adhered to a safety requirement put
forward by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to
lower fires caused by traffic collisions. According to this regulation, all
brand-new cars were to be able to resist a 20 mph rear-end accident
without losing gasoline by 1972 and a 30 mph impact by 1973. The 20-mph
test was a failure for every prototype. Ford conducted its own crash tests
on the Pinto in 1970, and the outcomes were the same: petrol tanks broke
and severe leaks. The few Pintos that passed the test had been modified,
either with a steel plate between the front and rear axles or a rubber
bladder in the petrol tank.
➢ Ford was aware that the Pinto posed a significant fire risk when hit from
behind, even in low-speed crashes. Ford executives had to make a choice.
Should they proceed with the current design, thereby endangering
customer safety but yet achieving the manufacturing schedule? Or should
they give foreign firms another year to dominate the subcompact market
by delaying manufacture of the Pinto and altering the petrol tank to make
it safer? Ford continued to use the original design and remained
committed to it for the following six years.
➢ What justifies Ford's choice? How did Ford arrive to that decision
specifically? We can't be certain, but an internal paper titled "Fatalities
Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires" describes the
company's cost-benefit analysis in situations like these. The calculations in
this paper, which addresses gasoline leaks in rollover incidents (as opposed
to rear-end crashes), are applicable to all Ford cars, not only the Pinto.
However, it shows the kind of logic that was presumably applied in the
Pinto instance.
➢ There were several methods for securing the Pinto's petrol tank. Ford
obviously believed that the extra expense exceeded the advantages of a
new tank design, despite the fact that the anticipated cost of these safety
upgrades ranged from $5 to $8 per car.
➢ Ford engineers calculated the cost of technological upgrades that
would stop petrol tanks from leaking in rollover accidents to be $11 per car
in the 'Fatalities' study. Before agreeing on the comparatively low estimate
of 180 deaths annually, the authors explore several estimates of the
number of individuals killed by flames from automobile rollovers. But how
can the worth of those people's lives be estimated given that number? Can
a person be valued in terms of dollars and cents? According to NHTSA.
According to a 1972 estimate, each time a person is killed in an automobile
accident, society suffers a loss of $200,725 (the actual amount now would,
of course, be much greater given inflation). The costs were broken down as
follows:
 Future productivity losses

Direct $132,000

Indirect $41,300

Medical costs

Hospital $700

Other $425

Property damage $1,500

Insurance administration $4,700

Legal and court expenses $3,000

Employer losses $1,000

Victim’s pain and suffering $10,000

Funeral $900

Assets (lost consumption) $5,000

 Miscellaneous accident costs $200

Total per fatality $200,725

➢Benefits
Savings: 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, 2,100 burned vehicles

Unit cost: $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury, $700 per vehicle

Total (180 X $200,000) + (180 X $67,000) + (2,100 X $700) = $49.5 million

benefit:

➢ Costs

Sales: 11 million cars, 1.5 million light trucks

Unit cost: $11 per car, $11 per truck

Total cost: 12.5 million X $11 = $137.5 million

➢ The "Fatalities" study consequently advises against any upgrades, which

Ford followed. As a result, the costs of the recommended safety
enhancements outweigh their advantages.
➢ In the instance of the Pinto, despite the test findings presented by its
engineers, Ford's management chose to continue with the original design
and not modify the gasoline tank. Here are some effects of Ford's choice:
• The Pinto caused a number of fire-related fatalities between 1971
and 1978. Ford claims the number is 23, but its detractors claim it is
 actually closer to 500. 95 percent of the victims would have
survived, according to the sworn testimony of Ford engineers, if
Ford had placed the gasoline tank over the axle (as it did on its Capri
cars).
• In 1976, NHTSA finally passed a 30-mph collision standard. The Pinto
later had a gasoline tank that couldn't leak. All 1971–1976 Ford
Pinto vehicles had to be recalled in 1978 due to fuel tank revisions.
• Between 1971 and 1978, approximately fifty lawsuits were brought
against Ford in connection with rear-end accidents in the Pinto. In
the Richard Grimshaw case, in addition to awarding over $3
million in compensatory damages to the victims of a Pinto crash,
the jury awarded a landmark $125 million in punitive damages
against Ford. The judge reduced punitive damages to 3.5 million.
• Judy Ulrich, then 18 years old, her 16-year-old sister Lynn, and their
18-year-old cousin Donna were killed when their 1973 Ford Pinto
was hit from behind by a van on August 10, 1978, close to Elkhart,
Indiana. On contact, the Pinto's petrol tank blew up. The three teens
died from burn injuries sustained in the ensuing fire. Ford was
accused of murder in a criminal act. The judge in the case instructed
the jury that Ford should be found guilty if it had manifestly ignored
the potential harm caused by its acts and that disregard marked a
significant departure from expected norms of behaviour. Ford was
declared not guilty of murder by jury on March 13, 1980.
• Ford, on the other hand, has consistently refuted claims that the
Pinto is less secure than similar vehicles from the same age. The
manufacturer further notes that the Pinto met or exceeded the
government's own criteria in every model year. But the firm fails to
mention that the implementation of any NHTSA crash criterion was
postponed for seven years as a result of effective lobbying by it and
its business partners. Furthermore, according to Ford's detractors,
there were more than 40 European and Japanese vehicles with safer
petrol tank positions in the Pinto's weight and price range. "Ford
made an extremely irresponsible decision" when they put such a
weak tank in such a stupid placement in such a flimsy back end, says
auto safety expert Byron Bloch.
• Has Ford's failure with the Pinto served as a lesson for the auto
industry? When an Atlanta jury found General Motors Corporation
liable for the death of a Georgia teenager in the catastrophic
collision of one of their pickup trucks in February 1993, other
onlookers did not share that opinion. General Motors claimed in its
defence at the trial that Shannon Moseley, 17, died as a result of the
impact of the high-speed collision rather than the intoxicated
motorist who slammed her truck in the side. The jury, however, was
satisfied that Moseley survived the crash only to be destroyed by a
fire brought on by the poor fuel-tank design of his vehicle. The jury
awarded Moseley's parents $4.2 million in real damages and $101
million in punitive damages after concluding that the firm knew that
their "side-saddle" gas tanks, which are situated outside the rails of
the truck's chassis, are dangerously prone to burst.
• The evidence of former GM safety engineer Ronald E. Elwell
probably influenced the jury. This time, Elwell switched sides and
told the jury that the company had known for years that the side-
saddle design was flawed but had purposefully concealed its
knowledge and had not made any attempts to fix the issue, despite
the fact that he had previously testified in more than fifteen cases
that the pickups were safe. During the trial, business representatives
tried to portray Elwell as a disgruntled worker, but videotapes of
General Motors' own crash testing confirmed his evidence. In
response to the verdict, General Motors stated that it was still
confident in the safety of its trucks and asserted "that a thorough
examination of the technical issues in this matter by the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration will bear out our contention
that the 1973-1987 full size pickup trucks do not have a safety
related defect."
• The Department of Transportation has since shown, however, that
GM trucks indeed present a fire danger and are more likely than
those of other manufacturers to catch fire when struck from the
side. Nevertheless, efforts to recall and fix the pickups have been
refused by GM. On a technicality, the Georgia Court of Appeals
overturned the jury's decision in the Shannon Moseley case even
though it found that GM knew the petrol tanks posed a risk but
 chose not to take the necessary steps to make them safer in order
to avoid incurring additional costs.

The Love Canal Disaster

➢ The Love Canal catastrophe near Niagara Falls, New York, is among
the most well-known and significant instances of groundwater
pollution in the United States. It is significant because Love Canal's
pollution catastrophe, along with others at the time (Times Beach,
Missouri, and Valley of Drums, Kentucky), contributed to the creation
of Superfund, a federal programme launched in 1980 with the aim of
locating and eradicating the worst hazardous chemical waste sites in
the United States.
➢ Niagara Falls' Love Canal neighbourhood is named after a sizable
ditch that was carved out for hydroelectric power in the 1890s and
measures around 15 metres wide, 3 to 12 metres deep, and 1600
metres long. The ditch was abandoned before it ever produced any
electricity and remained largely idle for decades, with the exception
of locals using it to swim in. Niagara Falls started to dump municipal
rubbish into Love Canal in the 1920s, and the U.S. Army did the same
in the 1940s, including debris from the hasty endeavour to make a
 nuclear weapon. In 1942, Hooker Chemical bought the property and
lined it with clay. The corporation then placed enormous metal
barrels filled with additional clay on top of an estimated 21,000
tonnes of dangerous chemical waste, including the carcinogens
benzene, dioxin, and PCBs, into Love Canal. A stipulation in the sales
contract that Hooker added when selling the property to the Niagara
Falls school board in 1953 for one dollar identified the land's purpose
as being filled with chemical waste and released them from any
future liability claims arising from the buried garbage. The local
school board quickly constructed a public school there and then sold
the surrounding property for a housing development that resulted in
the construction of around 200 residences along the canal banks and
another 1,000 dwellings in the adjacent area (Figure 1). The clay walls
and cover of the canal were broken during construction, destroying
several of the metal barrels.
➢ The metal barrels eventually made their way to the surface when the
chemical waste seeped into people's basements. Trees and gardens
started to wither, and rubber from children's shoes and bicycle tyres
crumbled into foul pools. Residents frequently complained about
unusual odours and substances that appeared in their yards between
the 1950s and the late 1970s. City officials looked into the situation,
but did nothing to address the issue. The New York State Health
Department's findings refuted claims that local inhabitants had
serious health issues, including a high prevalence of miscarriages,
birth deformities, and chromosomal damage. The state of emergency
at Love Canal was finally proclaimed in 1978 by President Carter,
making it the first environmental issue that was directly related to
humans. The Love Canal tragedy came to represent poor chemical
waste storage. Superfund provided the funding for Love Canal's
cleanup, which was done in full in 2004. polluted soil was removed,
drainage pipes were put in place to collect and treat polluted
groundwater, and the area was then covered with clay and plastic. In
1995, Occidental Chemical (the current name for Hooker Chemical)
paid $27 million to the Federal Emergency Management Association
for the relocation of more than 1,000 people and $102 million to
Superfund for remediation. For pollution caused by the Army, New
 York State paid the EPA $98 million, while the US government
contributed $8 million. $275 million was anticipated to be the overall
cost of the clean-up.
Superfund, which has examined tens of thousands of hazardous waste sites in
the U.S. and cleaned up hundreds of the worst ones, was established in part
thanks to the Love Canal catastrophe. Nevertheless, more than 1,000 big
hazardous waste sites that pose a serious risk to the environment or to human
health are still being cleaned up.
 Reference
➢ Grunwald, M. (1977). The Ford Pinto case: A study in applied ethics,
business, and technology. State University of New York Press.
➢ Hoffman, M. J. (1999). The Ford Pinto case: A reckless disregard for
human life. In Business ethics: Readings and cases in corporate
morality (pp. 373-382). McGraw-Hill.
➢ Halbert, T., & Ingulli, E. (2018). Law and ethics in the business
environment. Cengage Learning.
➢ Strobel, L. (2011). The Pinto fires: The argument for reforming the
product liability system. University of Michigan Journal of Law
Reform, 44(3), 553-586.
➢ Gibson, J. L. (1988). The Love Canal disaster: Anatomy of a public
health emergency. The Journal of Environmental Health, 51(1), 6-12.
➢ Brown, P. (1987). Popular epidemiology revisited. Current Sociology,
35(1), 129-146.
➢ Gottlieb, R. (1993). Forcing the spring: The transformation of the
American environmental movement. Island Press.
➢ Frank, R., & Geltman, E. (1984). Love Canal: The social construction of
an environmental crisis. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 9(2),
6-12.