Investigative Voices

Appalachia Demanding Accountability Amidst Disaster and Neglect

• Lidia LoPinto

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https://a.co/d/j4TUASZ   The Amazon  book
https://online.fliphtml5.com/fzizo/gvwx/
Is government corruption to blame for the Appalachian flood disaster? Join us as we explore the startling revelations from Lydia Lupinto's latest book, which uncovers the questionable decisions and priorities of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Learn how funds meant for maintaining critical infrastructure were instead diverted to green energy projects, leaving hydroelectric dams in disrepair and paving the way for catastrophic flooding. As we dissect these decisions, we'll question the balance between green energy advancement and crucial infrastructure upkeep, challenging the choices made by those in power.

The consequences of dam neglect are as devastating as they are complex. We'll delve into the harrowing impact on rural communities grappling with the fallout of prioritizing mining permits over essential infrastructure maintenance. Amidst a backdrop of government inaction and alleged corruption, conspiracy theories abound, suggesting intentional mismanagement for financial gain. With lives lost and communities demanding accountability, we'll explore the murky waters of resource allocation, questioning whether a shift in focus could have prevented this disaster.

Finally, we'll tackle the media's role—or lack thereof—in covering this flood crisis. Was there a concerted media blackout, and if so, who benefited? By examining government responses to domestic versus international crises, we'll shed light on the apparent disparity in aid allocation. As election season approaches, the need for leadership and transparency becomes ever more pressing. With Lydia's insights, we call for accountability and challenge listeners to demand more from those in power to prevent future tragedies.

Speaker 1:

Hi everybody, this is Lydia Lupinto and I wanted to announce that I have published a book. I promised an e-book and it is published by Investigated Voices, which is a group that does reports like this about government corruption, and this is the listing right now on Amazon. I also have it available as a flipbook, and this is kind of cool because this flipbook is available immediately. The minute you click on it, you'll see it and it gives you the whole report and it has this little AI here and you can ask it all kinds of questions. If you're looking for answers right away, it has read the book and if you ask it a question, it'll answer. So that's also listed. It's listed on my page, okay. So here I have asked it who are the board of directors of the TVA, and it did so.

Speaker 1:

It's a pretty long book. It's over 139 pages. It has several chapters Plus. It has also an appendix. It has also an appendix. It has several articles that you can use, cut and paste and put them onto your own website if you want, and a lot of references, and through those references you can contact organizations that can be helpful. So let me turn this around so you can see my face, okay. So basically, what this book does is it puts together all of the information I gathered for Let me get it again For the Appalachian flood, and when I started the research I didn't know it would lead this far, but I'll give you a gist of what it is.

Speaker 1:

And, by the way, this video is going to turn into a podcast, so you can. There's also a link to my podcast. Okay, you can, there's also a link to my podcast, okay. So basically, what the book does is explain the problem Appalachia has been having for several years of corruption. There are numerous organizations fighting this corruption taking the TVA, tennessee Valley Authority and the government to court. So this flood was no surprise to anybody that it would happen. For the longest time maybe the last three years since this new administration and possibly even before, but I just did a three-year they haven't done much about upgrading those dams. The dams were crumbling, there were all kinds of issues, they couldn't drain them and they were kind of neglected. And what the organizations claim is that the Tennessee Valley Authority has shifted its focus to green, renewable energies such as wind turbines and solar. So, according to what I read, the TVA is a federal government-owned organization that runs the dams, as opposed to in other locations, that the dams that generate hydroelectric power are run by companies. Okay, this dam is run completely by the federal government and it's a set of multiple dams and I have all the links where you can find out exactly what dams were involved in the flood and what happened.

Speaker 1:

There were three dams that opened up to flood the communities. And they opened up and it was the equivalent of Niagara Falls going on to an unsuspected community. There seemed to be no warning. From what people say, there was no warning. I think there was a radio warning, but probably too late. People couldn't get away, they couldn't evacuate. It was probably too late. People couldn't get away, they couldn't evacuate. Usually, when a dam is about to breach, they give plenty of warning and people have time to evacuate, but not in this case. There was one dam that did have evacuations a few weeks before.

Speaker 1:

For several months the dams were full and nothing was being done to drain them. Like I said, if you can't drain them from the gates, you have to find another way to drain them into some other body of water through pipes. But you're going to have to drain them or you're putting people at risk. So there seemed to be no money for these projects. Well, there was money to buy. Millions of dollars were spent on buying wind turbines from China and solar panels by the TVA, with money that they were supposed to reinvest into their infrastructure, and they were calling this a green energy initiative.

Speaker 1:

However, it's as if people are not educated enough to understand that hydroelectric power is the greenest energy there is. There is nothing greener. It doesn't use any hydrocarbons to run those turbines. It runs completely on water power that comes from the ability of the rain to bring it up the mountain the ability of the rain to bring it up the mountain. So why would they call windmills and solar panels green initiatives, when the whole system of dams is a green initiative? Because a lot of them have hydropower and they do make an income from the hydroelectric power, but chose to spend it on these green initiatives, which means they buy equipment from China, install it instead of covering up the dams, and that's what people have been saying and what I researched that there was a long. What I could see had no engineering background, no background in hydroelectric power. Their idea of green energy was windmills and solar energy and apparently they didn't have enough technological training to know that hydroelectric is the best domestic green energy you can get, because it's totally in the United States.

Speaker 1:

So the disrepair of these dams was continuing as the corruption ended up making deals with lobbyists to purchase these items from China, and the actual infrastructure went completely unnoticed or neglected, and not just, of course, the dams, the concrete that holds the water, but also the turbines that run and generate the electricity, all the wires, all of that has to be maintained, repaired, replaced. And that money, instead of going into that, it was going into something else. The TVA was supposed to reinvest any money it makes from electric power into its infrastructure, whether it was concrete dams or electric wires or turbines. So it seems that that was the type of corruption that delayed the repairs, the diverting of monies to go into Biden's green energy, which is really more of a way to, I guess, divert American money into China, buying products that we don't know what the prices of these products, that we don't know what the prices of these, what they paid for these green energy products, the windmills or the solar panels. That's going to be my next investigation. I don't have the figures of what they paid, but I know a total of millions of dollars, which is in the book, and there are several organizations that compile this data, which I have referenced. You can look them up online and take a look at their reports. This is only a summary of what they've published.

Speaker 1:

We dug deep into this issue of the neglect of the dams and people's outcries being ignored and people complaining. The other part of the report talks about the lithium mining and how the lithium mining and processing does two things. One, it mines lithium and refines it in a plant, and the other thing it does is it recycles batteries. Well, people, they said, or claimed, that this was going to generate 300 jobs in the area, to generate 300 jobs in the area. But the farmers especially were not happy because the water that they used to water their crops was going to be contaminated and that could kill their crops, because these contaminants could easily kill the crops and there didn't seem to be any method of cleaning the water that was satisfactory to the community. So there was a fight there with the recycling plant, with the lithium mining and recycling plants, somehow.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of conspiracy theories. They think, well, they wanted those permits to run the plants and so they opened the dams on purpose. That's what the conspiracy theorists are saying online, they have no proof of this. All we know is that the dams had to be opened because they were full, and they have been full for weeks and they had extra. They had rain for two or three weeks and they couldn't absorb it all because they were already full and they couldn't drain them fast enough. So it's a matter of them proving that they did their best to drain those dams before the rain started. What capacity were those dams before the rain started that filled up the dams so quickly? And they're going to have to prove that in court, because they're taking them to court for damages to the community, because this is the first time since the 1940s that these dams failed so completely, and in the past they were able to handle lots of rainstorms and rain like this, because that area does get a lot of rain. Okay, so this is what they're going to be battling in court.

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot in this report and, considering that most of the videos I see claim that there's many more dead people than the government wants to admit apparently thousands because simply they saw thousands of body bags being shipped to the area and some of the people on the videos are saying that they're bulldozing an area and the bodies were not all found and they're just going to be buried, or some places they had landslides and the bodies were buried and they keep finding people in the river and trees everywhere. And there is a group that has tabulated the missing people that haven't yet been found, and I think there's a group on Facebook like that. So clearly there are more dead bodies than they want to admit. Maybe they're just found only 200. But it's a tragedy and I called it a crime against humanity government corruption, floods, appalachia because all of these issues should have been addressed earlier, probably three years earlier.

Speaker 1:

If they were having trouble with these dams and they couldn't drain them, they should have allocated the money they spent on these windmills and solar panels, which were deals with lobbyists. They should have allocated those funds to making it possible to drain these aging dams, maybe all the way to the bottom, and just put them out of commission. Just put them out of commission. They should have been doing this three years ago and it just got to the point that the neglect was so that they collapsed. They couldn't handle the rain, which is what they were meant to do, and they opened the dams.

Speaker 1:

Now that is documented that they opened these dams. I have the list of dams that were opened. I think it was three of them. They opened at the same time. So that's why people have conspiracy theories. They can't imagine that all three had to be opened at the same time. Maybe they think it was on purpose had to be opened at the same time. Maybe they think it was on purpose.

Speaker 1:

So do you blame people that are so desperate and so hurt by what happened, lost so many relatives, lost their homes, lost everything in the world. Even the whole town was bulldozed. Do you blame people for thinking this was a crime that they perpetrated against them? I don't blame them and I wouldn't call them conspiracy theorists. I would look into it. You never know, but as far as I know, this was a long problem that was happening for months and years and this is a problem that wasn't addressed.

Speaker 1:

The government apparently had money to send billions of dollars to Ukraine without any government approval, to the tune of about $6,000 per resident of the Ukraine, and that money went into rebuilding their dams and their infrastructure and rebuilding. The government had money to send to Israel, to Lebanon and many other places, and they had troops everywhere. Okay, and when it comes to Appalachia, the troops took a while to get there. Fema was there, but apparently people couldn't find it or there were issues with it miscommunication, lack of cooperation between local groups that were trying to help and the FEMA people so there was definitely an issue there.

Speaker 1:

From what I see, a lot of people were just angry and so they took it out on the FEMA people and apparently FEMA just called everybody liars and conspiracy theorists when they claimed that FEMA was either not doing their jobs or doing it poorly or whatever, and they launched that campaign of calling people liars and they even launched that campaign of fact-checkers taking out all of the disinformation. So I think you should fight disinformation with information Instead of fight people by shutting them up. You should show them that they were wrong and show examples of the work you did. I don't think shutting people up who are desperate and just lost everything, and shutting them down and calling them liars is a good plan for FEMA. And that's exactly what they did. They were calling these people liars. So FEMA is a whole other entity and this is not what this report is about.

Speaker 1:

So this report is about what led to this disaster the government, corruption and misappropriation of funds. That should have gone into repairing these dams and having proper warnings if the dams were going to go, if they knew those dams were so full that just a little bit more rain was going to mean they're going to have to open them up. There should have been notices two weeks before, when they were already full. There should have been notices that people should evacuate because they knew that there was a possibility that a hurricane was going to come that way, because it does that every once in a while. Okay, and they were already having rain. So a warning hey, let's evacuate, because you're in trouble here with these dams should have been what they should have done. But for that you need money, you need the army, you need a place for people to go, you need so much organization that the government didn't provide.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that pissed the victims off was the lack of coverage. It seemed that every other news item, including this Diddy fiasco and the election and other problems, seemed to be more important than their plight or their losses. And it spans several states, it spans millions of people. Here we're talking about a lot of people and a lot of deaths, and the media seemed to obscure this. Now I wasn't sure if it's true that the media was not reporting on these things.

Speaker 1:

If it's true that the media was not reporting on these things, so I took AI and I do a lot of AI research and I had it list to me, all of the articles that appeared during the storm, about the storm aftermath, okay about rescue operations, about damages, about floods, all the articles that appeared both locally and in mainstream media. So I had the list and now I asked AI considering all the other articles the mainstream media published, do you think that the floods in Appalachia were properly covered, considering the magnitude of the damage? And it said no. It seems that this is AI concluding this from the data that the mainstream media was actively trying to obscure this event in favor of other less important stories, such as this Diddy story, which nobody cares anymore and indefinitely, the election and the rallies by the Democrat candidate. So that was AI telling me that. So I had AI write an article and tell me well, explain what you mean and give me some references to show that, yes, the mainstream media was not covering this as much as you should, considering the magnitude of the losses here.

Speaker 1:

Also, I asked if in any place in any of the articles of the mainstream media was there any mention of TVA and government responsibility as far as this flood issue? Due to the fact that they had not maintained these dams and the fact that they opened the dams, and it said no, that mostly it kept claiming that the storm had pushed the water up, which is complete nonsense. The rivers went up because they opened the dams, not because the storm pushed any water up, and you can see the flow of these dams. There are maps available online for the TVA. This is a very well-known system of dams. You could see how they flow into each other and what towns it flows into the rivers, and what would happen if you opened up all the dams. You could see that. See that? Okay, so they opened three dams and one of the videos said that they released uh, hundreds of thousands of gallons and um in in minutes. That's why people had a flood, because it was a very fast flow, very quickly, because they opened their dams so much. Okay, why did they have to open them up all the way like that?

Speaker 1:

Well, that is another question for more research, because this is this research requires a lot of work. Now I also asked AI to list all of the articles that were published about this in the last few days and in the last three years about the dams, locally, in local newspapers and there were quite a few, fortunately so that I could generate this report and there were quite a few organizations that are dedicated to gathering this information and taking the TVA to court. There are a lot of court cases already. None of this was mentioned in the mainstream media. It was only found through local research of local newspapers and organizations, and for that I used a tool from Chachapiti which does deep searches into the web. Okay, and it saves hours of research time because it locates these articles deep into. You know how Google sometimes buries stuff by putting it on page 25 and you can't find it. Well, this thing can go through up to page 25 and search for those keywords right away, and the AI knows how to switch the keywords around to finally found found stuff that's totally buried in the, because, as you know, the search engines really also cater to the mainstream media and they will bury stuff if it's not politically good for the Democrats, okay. So this was another reason I used multiple search engines and used AI to help me do the searches. So all the information you will find in this article took a week or two to generate, basically using multiple, multiple runs of AI to look for information, and I put all this information here in lists that you can find them now, with links and everything, and I extracted the information, summarized it and organized it, and I also list all of the different court lawsuits, court lawsuits and you can always look those up on public searches and there you can find who is bringing up the lawsuit and you can make connections that way lawyers, et cetera. So I hope this tool helps everybody.

Speaker 1:

As I said, the flip HTML one that's cute with the AI chat on it, is free. All you have to do is click on it and there it is and you can page through all the pages. I'm not sure if it has a download. I'm looking for it. I was going to get it so that you can download it, but I think I have to pay extra for that service, so I didn't. But you can read it right there. You know you can zoom on it and you can search it.

Speaker 1:

The Kindle one I think I went as low as Amazon would allow me, which is $0.99. And for the next two weeks it's free. Let me just show you that one, you see. So it's already there and there is a print version for $7 and a Kindle version which, if you have the Kindle Unlimited, you can get for free. And also it's $0 for the next two weeks and then after that it's $0.99. Zero dollars for the next two weeks and then after that it's 99 cents. So you can get the book there on Amazon if you happen to have a Kindle and you like using that. There it is everything and of course, the Kindle documents are also searchable.

Speaker 1:

I didn't do a PDF straight download to your phone, because this is a very large document and so you know it's. It's going to be a little tough, uh, for you to hold it on your phone, so this is probably the best way to do it. You get either the kindle or you get the um, the uh, html, which is right here. So in this, let me just show you I have a lot of nice illustrations here. I have a preface that I made and everything has. Every chapter has a cute illustration which kind of gives you an idea. Like this one here, for example, has some solar panels and some windmills on top of a crumbling dam If that doesn't tell you what's going on, what does. So it's got pictures too. I worked very hard on these pictures, so I hope you get it. It costs nothing if you get the HTML and you get that AI little bot to help you.

Speaker 1:

And this is my contribution, and I'm going to be doing more reports like this. I realize that this is a great service to people, like this. I realized that this is a great service to people and there's many other government corruption issues, as you know. I could probably write hundreds of these reports, so I'm going to start writing them. I do have now a new profile and let me show you. It's called Investigative Voices. Okay, so this is my new profile. On Facebook, they allow you to make separate profiles now. So this is my profile and here I have the book linked. I have a couple of posts. I also have a couple of posts. I also have a podcast, so this video is going to be turned into a podcast, which is also distributed on a few other platforms for podcasts, including YouTube. There's a podcast Investigative Voices on YouTube, on Spotify and many other places. So my you know, and the book will be linked to those podcasts and I'm going to continue this work In addition to writing my fiction books, which I have been working on.

Speaker 1:

I decided to do some real investigations and generate reports like this to help people, because sometimes the hardest part of bringing up a court case or getting started with a court case is getting all this information together. And if this can help you join other people that have lawsuits against the government, this is great. You can make connections, you can get all the information together, you can research more information. Please go to the local libraries for a lot of this information, especially libraries in your local municipalities if they haven't been flooded out. And because a lot of this information is actively being obscured by the mainstream media.

Speaker 1:

Obviously because if the federal government was running the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and they neglected to do their jobs of keeping these dams operational, this is not going to be good for the election, is it? If they screwed up this bad, this badly and you know, definitely all of the people that run the TVA were appointed directly by Biden back in May. I'm sure Kamala Harris had something to do with it, because back in May Biden was really not working. It was not well. You know that he was sick for a while. He had COVID, he had other issues, so it was Kamala that was in charge as the vice president.

Speaker 1:

So if she nominated these people in May and they were all green New Deal activists thinking that somehow hydroelectric power was not green and they were out buying windmills and solar panels instead of fixing the dams, I think this does not look very good for Kamala Harris, I'm sorry to say, because at some point somebody has to take responsibility for this disaster. Okay, somebody does so. At this point I would say get the book, use it, pass it around, give people the link and hopefully this can lead to accountability. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.