This is a regurgitation of the same article as last week, only with even more factual blunders. Let’s start with the obvious. The article is only talking about parks with water wells. That’s maybe 10% of all parks (probably more like 5%). Roughly 8% of Americans live in “trailers”, but less than half of that number live in mobile home parks, with the other half residing on their own private land. So here’s the actual math: 300 million Americans times 3% = 9 million Americans. Then multiply that number by 10% and you get 900,000. Then take away all the water wells that are properly permitted and maintained (about 50% according to the article, which I will bet $100 is completely wrong and more like 90%) and you have 450,000 people. So the title should be “hundreds of thousands” and not “millions”, even based on the writer’s faulty figures and logic.
But then there are other difficulties with the stats here. This entire article series is not based on any actual data but extrapolating some bureaucrat’s opinion regarding only the mobile home parks of Utah. Utah, and that region of the U.S., has some of the worst contaminants of water – including arsenic – that require methods of active extraction. In most of the other states, all you have to contend with is adding chlorine for water purification. So that’s hardly a fair data set to base assumptions on.
There are definitely “trailer parks” out there that have unlicensed water wells with zero supervision. We’ve all driven through their muddy roads where the homes lack skirting and the tenants lack shoes. Nobody buys those, and they remain in the hands of the original mom and pop builders for an eternity. But to claim that those properties are a fair representation of all the properties with licensed water wells that are regularly inspected based on state, county and city laws is ludicrous.
