The Flint Water Crisis
By: Ruth Gazetti
Tags: Flint Water Crisis

Michigan, the home of the Great Lakes, the state that provides the most freshwater to the country; but failed to provide clean water to its own citizens. In 2014, the city of Flint decided to break off from the Detroit water supply. Flint decided to use the water from the Flint River as the city’s main source of water as a way for the city to save money. This could have worked if the government had taken the right precautions and treated the pipes before use, but sadly, this was not the case.

A couple days after switching to the Flint River water residents started to complain about the water from their taps “looked, smelled, and tasted foul.” The government reassured the Flint residents that there was nothing wrong with the water and it continued to be pumped into the homes of Flint for 18 months.

Five months after the switch to the Flint River water, fecal coliform, which is a type of bacteria (including E. coli), was detected in Flint’s water supply system. The city issued its first “boil water” advisory and while this killed the bacteria, it increased the concentration of lead in the water. Throughout the first couple months of the switch, the government’s plan was to keep treating the water with chlorine so that it disinfected the water; except the source of the problem was not the water itself, rather it was the pipes that the water was running through.

Studies have shown that the contaminated water contributed to “doubling — and in some cases, tripling — of the incidence of elevated blood lead levels in the city’s children, imperiling the health of its youngest generation.” The city’s switch to the Flint River also resulted in an outbreak of legionnaire’s’ disease, which is a severe form of pneumonia, that ended up killing twelve people.

Nine months after the switch, Flint officials notify residents that “their water is in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act due to excess levels of TTHM…the warning notice states that the harmful chemicals can imperil ‘liver, kidneys, or central nervous systems’ and may cause an ‘increased risk of getting cancer’ in those who consume large quantities of them over years, but that otherwise the water is safe to drink.” The high levels of TTHM will continue until September of 2015.

Lead Contamination in Flint Compared to EPA Limits

Lead in water is measured in parts per billion, or ppb. The EPA recommends that if lead levels are higher than 15 ppb, homeowners and cities should take immediate action to reduce that level. There is no safe level of lead in drinking water, only acceptable ones. Levels as low as 5ppb can be a cause of concern, especially for young children.

The 90th percentile of Flint was about 27 parts per billion, which is 5 times higher than the level of concern. It is nearly twice as high as the EPA’s already generous guidelines. “Health effects of lead levels this high ‘can include high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems, kidney damage and memory and neurological problems.’”

The other 10 percent of homes in Flint had even higher levels of lead in their water. The lowest reading they found in the 10 percentile was 200 ppb. More than half of the readings came in at more than 1,000 ppb. The EPA considers water with lead levels of 5,000 or above to be toxic waste. The highest reading “registered at 13,000 ppb.”

Flint’s government did not handle this situation well, which resulted in 15 government officials having criminal charges filed against them in April 2016. The government reassured their citizens for several months that the water from Flint’s river was perfectly fine to drink. They also knew about the high levels of TTHM for several months before they told their residents. Detroit offered to reconnect Flint to their water supply for free, but Flint’s government officials declined the offer. After Flint’s city council voted to reconnect to Detroit’s water system, Jerry Ambrose, the city’s emergency manager, overrules the vote. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services director, Nick Lyon, was ordered in August 2018 to stand trial on two involuntary manslaughter charges linked to the outbreak of legionnaires disease.

Flint’s government was not the only group of people that improperly handled the Flint water crisis. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, or MDEQ, also had a major impact on some of the decisions that could have stopped this crisis from escalating. In December 2015, the MDEQ was blamed for a majority of the issues resulting in this crisis, which resulted in top officials resigning from the agency. Ten months after the switch the EPA had their first interaction with the MDEQ about the lead contamination and corrosion control in Flint. “The local MDEQ supervisor states that Flint has an ‘optimized corrosion control program’ in place.” The MDEQ also consistently reassured the residents of Flint that their water was fine. Researchers at Virginia Tech analyzed 252 Flint water samples and reported that “nearly 17 percent of samples measure above the 15-ppb federal lead action level. The team also determines that Flint’s water is 19 times more corrosive than Detroit’s.” The MDEQ dismissed the findings.

Eighteen months after the switch, on October 16, 2015, Flint’s residents are finally reconnected to Detroit’s water system. They are told to continue using bottled or filtered water until the new and properly treated water is flushed through the system. “Even after the re-connection to Detroit’s treated water, it will take more than a year for the anti-corrosion treatment to work effectively to reduce lead levels in Flint’s tap water.”

Throughout this crisis, many celebrities helped by donating bottles of water and money to the city of Flint. Some of them also went to Twitter and stated their opinion about the problem. As seen in the graph above, the top 5 celebrity donations to the Flint water crisis was Bruno Mars who donated $1,000,000, The Game who donated $500,000, Pearl Jam who donated $300,000 and also donated water bottles to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs goal of 1 million water bottles, Big Sean who donated $100,000, and Dave Chappelle who donated $50,000.

Another celebrity who has done a lot for the city of Flint is Jaden Smith. When Jaden Smith first heard about the Flint Water Crisis, he went to church. Jaden Smith and Drew FitzGerald cofounded the nonprofit 501CThree with the goal of solving problems relating to water, food, shelter, and energy using smart design and engineering. Their company partnered with First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church who had been giving out water bottles to Flint citizens since the crisis started. The project they launched was a mobile water filtration device called the Water Box. The first Water Box was launched in March 2019. “In the months since, the device has cleaned 8,500 gallons of water, or enough to replace more than 68,000 plastic water bottles.” In September they installed a second one in northern Flint that serves “6,000 people.”

The Flint water crisis was an environmental disaster that should not have happened. It affected thousands of lives and continues to everyday. While Flint does have clean tap water now, the city is still trying to find the rest of the contaminated pipes. This crisis not only resulted in people getting sick, and in some cases dying, it also made the citizens of Flint loose trust in their government. With the help of donations and Jaden Smith’s Water Box, the Flint water crisis is slowly starting to become history. While this is a great victory for the citizens of Flint, we need to remember this incident so that it does not happen again.