Looking Back At The Flint Water Crisis

Water & Health Problems Still Plague This Michigan City Ten Years Since The Toxic Tragedy Began.

When most of us think of a water crisis, we think of what we saw in Flint, Michigan, ten years ago this month.

In 2014, Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show for the last time. Janet Yellen was sworn in as the first woman to chair the U.S. Federal Reserve. It was the year of the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS research. A West Virginia water crisis also occurred when chemicals begin leaking from a tank owned by Freedom Industries into the Elk River, and about 300,000 people were told not to use their tap water.

Flint River water started flowing through the city’s pipes in April 2014. The switch from Detroit water was estimated to save the city millions of dollars.

Flint mayor Dayne Walling called the water “regular, good, pure drinking water, and it’s right in our backyard. This is the first step in the right direction for Flint, and we take this monumental step forward in controlling the future of our community’s most precious resource.”

In May, almost immediately after the switch, residents started complaining about both the smell and the color of the water. In August and September, the city issued three boil-water advisories after high levels of bacteria were detected.

In October, General Motors announced its plans to stop using the water because it was corroding auto parts. The company negotiated a private deal to buy Lake Huron water for its Flint plant. GM was one of the largest water consumers in town, so the city was now looking at the loss of close to half a million dollars a year.

It was the summer of 2014 when LeeAnne Walters, a 37-year-old mother of four, realized something was terribly wrong with her water. Every time her kids took a bath or swam in their pool, they broke out in tiny red bumps. Like any concerned mom, she went to the pediatrician. At first, she got the diagnosis of dermatitis. The doctor thought her children’s skin was reacting to some kind of allergen. When it didn’t clear up, she went back to the doctor’s office and came home with a second diagnosis: eczema. This time she had a cortisone cream to rub right on the rashes. When that didn’t work, she was told it must be scabies. After three diagnoses and the kids’ skin still erupting in red bumps, she realized it might be something their skin came in contact with every day.

When the water started flowing out brown from her taps, even with a water filter, she started stocking up on bottled water, about 40 gallons a week for drinking, cooking, and bathing. The red bumps went away, but a bigger problem was brewing. LeeAnne’s home became what is now considered ground zero in the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.

In January 2015, residents were issued a notice, alerting them to high levels of THMs detected in the water. When LeeAnne received this notification in the mail, she decided to attend her first city council meeting. Many of the city’s residents were showing up to these meetings, reporting the same problems with their water— strange odors and colors. They described health problems ranging from rashes to hair loss to neurological conditions.

Despite protests by residents lugging jugs of brown and discolored water, officials maintained that the water was safe to drink. However, common sense told the residents otherwise.

Through persistent calls, LeeAnne got through to water utility manager Mike Glasgow, who agreed to test her water. At this point, the water coming out of her sink had an orange hue. Service center employees went out that week to flush the hydrants, as per procedure. But a week later the water color was unchanged, so he tested the water at her faucet. The results came back at about 104 ppb for lead, when the legal limit is 15 ppb. He instructed her not to drink, cook, or brush her teeth with the water at those levels.

By March 2015, the Flint City Council voted 7–1 to stop using the river water and reconnect with Detroit’s system, but Jerry Ambrose, the emergency manager in place at that time, overruled the vote and issued the following statement:

Flint water today is safe by all (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) and (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) standards, and the city is working daily to improve its quality. Users also pay some of the highest rates in the state because of the decreased numbers of users and the age of the system.

It is incomprehensible to me that (seven) members of the Flint City Council would want to send more than $12 million a year to the system serving Southeast Michigan, even if Flint rate payers could afford it. (Lake Huron) water from Detroit is no safer than water from Flint.

I started receiving emails from Flint around this time. One day, more than 30 emails stacked up in my inbox from people living in Flint. Hundreds more poured in. What stood out most to me were the pictures of the water coming out of the faucet. It was yellow, brown, orange, and mucky. If we saw this kind of water running from taps in a developing country, we would send aid. People were reporting health issues to me, such as rashes and diarrhea, and they were scared for their children’s health.

Melissa Mays, a mom to three boys, was one of the first people to email me. The water at her house was coming out of the faucet yellow. She said depending on the day, it would smell like rotten eggs, dirt, or bleach. Her family started developing rashes and having clumps of hair fall out. Melissa started talking to her neighbors, who said they were having the same issues. These symptoms started shortly after the city switched the drinking water source, which is an important observation.

One of the biggest missteps in Flint was to not add corrosion-controlling chemicals at the water treatment plant. Officials at the MDEQ have since admitted that it was “a disastrous mistake when they failed to require the city to add corrosion-control chemicals as part of the treatment process.”

The corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, joints, and fixtures. Flint eventually reconnected to the Detroit water system in October 2015, after nearly a year and a half of denial, and once major damage was already done to the antiquated water infrastructure system, not to mention all the people drinking the water.

Fire departments became bottled water distribution centers; police officers went door-to-door handing out bottled water and water filters. Yet, all of it was preventable. For almost 18 months, people were told to relax and that nothing was wrong, but it all proved to be lies and cover-up.

In Flint lead was leaching into the water supply for almost two years and public officials said everything was fine. Former Flint mayor Dayne Walling went as far as to drink the contaminated water on local TV to assure residents it was safe to drink.

Disasters like Flint don’t happen overnight. The city was trying to cut costs but did not have the measures in place to do it safely. As soon as the water treatment operators, the city, and the state became aware of the problem, they should have taken action. But they didn’t. They covered it up. They told residents everything was fine, exposing 100,000 people, including thousands of children, to dangerous levels of lead and cancer-causing disinfection byproducts.

The water situation is still a mess in Flint, and the fallout is ongoing. People still won’t drink unfiltered water, and though money has been allocated to replace and update pipes, it will take years to complete this task. The state has poured more than $350 million into Flint to help fix the water problems, on top of a $100 million grant the EPA awarded to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to fund drinking water infrastructure improvements throughout the city.

Flint taught us about the cover-ups happening in state and local agencies to protect themselves rather than the people they serve.

The Crisis Continues…

As recently as 2023, the City of Flint, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy continued to recommend that Flint residents use faucet filters that are certified to remove lead until residential lead service line replacement is completed citywide.

The health impacts continue to be studied as well. As many as a quarter of children in Flint, about 7 times the national average, may have experienced elevated blood lead levels after the city’s water crisis, and more children should have been screened, research from Cornell University revealed in 2022.

Research published in 2021 from Cornell and the University of Michigan gave the first comprehensive evidence that the city’s adult residents suffered a range of adverse physical and mental health symptoms potentially linked to the crisis in the years during and following it, with Black residents affected disproportionately.

In a survey of more than 300 residents, 10 percent reported having been diagnosed by a clinician with elevated blood lead levels, well above national averages.

Almost half the survey respondents reported experiencing skin rashes and more than 40 percent experienced hair loss, among physical symptoms associated with elevated levels of bacteria and heavy metals in water. More than a quarter of respondents reported symptoms of depression or anxiety, and nearly a third had PTSD symptoms specifically related to the water crisis.

“If you don’t trust your water and you actively avoid it over persistent concerns on its safety, that’s a stark form of psychological trauma in and of itself,” said Jerel Ezell, a native of the Flint area, who served as principal investigator for the survey.

Michigan has spent at least $60 million in legal costs related to the Flint water crisis, including what was spent to litigate a historic settlement with the city of Flint as well as the prosecution and defense of more than a dozen state employees, according to the Detroit News.

The tally reflects the costs of civil litigation that resulted in a $600 million state settlement in 2023 and legal expenses for two rounds of prosecutions that have spanned two attorneys general and resulted, ultimately, in a few misdemeanor plea deals and no convictions.

Residents still haven't seen a penny from the legal settlement.

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Can you believe it’s been 10 years since the Flint Water Crisis? How did watching this crisis unfold change your relationship to drinking water? Let us know in the comments below.