Flint, Michigan, where a growing number of residents are demanding the arrest of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder over the ongoing water contamination crisis. Governor Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint on Wednesday after learning federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into the lead contamination of the drinking water. Lead can cause permanent health impacts including memory loss and developmental impairment.
The poisoning began after an unelected emergency manager appointed by Michigan Governor Snyder switched Flint’s water source to the long-polluted Flint River in a bid to save money. Researchers at Virginia Tech, who have been testing Flint water, say the city could have corrected the problem by better treating the water at a cost of as little as $100 a day. On Thursday, mayor of Flint revealed it could now cost as much as $1.5 billion to fix the city’s water infrastructure.
For over a year, Flint residents have complained about the quality of the water, but their cries were ignored by state officials. In February, tests showed alarming levels of lead in the water, but officials told residents there was no threat. That same month, an EPA official named Miguel Del Toral wrote an email to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality warning about lead contamination. No action was taken. He wrote another email in April to the EPA. Then in July, Governor Snyder’s chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, wrote an email to health officials admitting Flint residents were, “basically getting blown off by us,”.
Curt Guyette talking:
this was a decision made while the city of Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, and, in a purely economically driven decision. Governor Snyder appointed someone over him, unelected, to run the city. And the elected officials only had as much power as that emergency manager decides to give them. Their pay is determined by the emergency manager. What authority they have, if any at all, is determined by the emergency manager. So, essentially, at that point, the mayor and City Council are employees of the appointed emergency manager.
Of the school districts and cities where emergency managers have been appointed, I think all except one are majority-African-American cities and school districts. And also, they are very high percentage of people living in poverty. So, they’re cities with majorities people of color and very poor cities. And they were—one of the reasons that they were pushed into the financial duress that they were put in was because of cuts in revenue sharing imposed by this governor. So they pretty much pushed them over the financial edge and then took them over.
And these emergency managers can sell off assets. They can break collective bargaining agreements. They can cut the healthcare benefits of retirees. They can break—abolish ordinances, create new ordinances. About the only thing that the law says that they specifically cannot do is miss a bond payment.
they can also change the water supply of a city. And that’s what they did in Flint in order to save—at the time, the claim was that it would save about $5 million a year. they had been on the Detroit system for 50 years, getting clean, safe water from Detroit. And prior to that, a decision was made that they were going to join a project to build a pipeline from Lake Huron to Genesee County, where Flint is, which is about 70 miles northwest of Detroit. They were going to build this new pipeline. And while they were building the pipeline, in order to save money for maybe a period of like two years, the decision was made to start using the very, very corrosive Flint River to supply the city’s water.
people knew from the beginning, as soon as the switch was made in April of ’14, that the water was bad. It looked bad. It tasted bad. It smelled bad. And there was all sorts of problems throughout 2014. In 2015, one of the residents, LeeAnne Walters, had her water tested by the city, and the lead levels came back at over 100 parts per billion. Of course, there’s no safe levels of lead whatsoever. The federal action level is 15 parts per billion. So it was about seven times what the federal action level was. She had it tested a second time, and it came back almost 400 parts per billion. And at that point, the EPA became aware of what those test results were, and started sending emails to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, asking them what was going on, asked them what was going on in terms of corrosion control.
Detroit had added phosphates to the water, which creates a biofilm that kind of coats the pipes and keeps lead particles adhered to the pipes rather than letting it leach into the water. The Flint River is many times more corrosive than Detroit. So they switched to a water source that was much, much more corrosive, and when corrosion control was more needed than ever, they inexplicably stopped using it, compounding the problem. And that corrosive water, without corrosion control in it, just began tearing apart the pipes.
And as Dr. Edwards has pointed out, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of chemistry could have looked at the situation and predicted what would happen. But—and we don’t know. And that’s one of the questions that remain unanswered at this point, is: Did they take a serious look at what was going on with that river before they decided to make the switch? And it’s either they didn’t do that, which I would think is gross negligence, or they did do it and ignored whatever they found. But that’s one of the, I think, big questions at this point that remains unaddressed.
Miguel Del Tora is really the unsung hero in this whole saga. He began asking questions. He took a personal interest in the Walters family, went there, looked at their house, established that they didn’t have any lead plumbing, which the city was claiming was the source of the problem, because all along the way everybody involved in the decision to switch to the Flint River did everything they could to deny that the river was what caused this problem to erupt. Mr. Del Toral went there, investigated, hooked Ms. Walters and her family up with Dr. Edwards and the people at Virginia Tech. They conducted their own independent, very, very thorough tests.
Marc Edwards talking:
we met LeeAnne because her child had been lead poisoned at that point, and there was no other lead source in her home at all, based on Miguel Del Toral’s investigation. So we did a very, very thorough sampling, as Curt said, of her home, and we found the worst lead-in-water contamination that we have seen in 25 years of working in the field. And LeeAnne herself figured out that the city and state were lying about the use of corrosion control. The EPA had been asked point—asked the Department of Environmental Quality point-blank, “Are you using corrosion control?” And they lied and said yes. And LeeAnne is the one who figured out there was no corrosion control. So, when she informed us of what was going on, we became involved because it was very clear at that point that the agencies who were paid to protect children from this neurotoxin, lead, were not going to do their job.
So she stayed, even after her children had been lead poisoned, to fight for other children in the city, helped coordinate the sampling event. And somewhat fittingly, the day she left Flint, they switched back to the Detroit River. But that was months later. I met her early on because of the contamination and the fact her child was lead poisoned, and she was concerned about what was going on not only to her children, but to other children in Flint.
this problem should have been stopped, even if there was complete incompetence on the part of the state, with the Del Toral memo. But as Curt mentioned, EPA covered it up. They apologized for this memo that was written. It perfectly explained what was going on, including the fact that Flint was breaking federal law. And EPA administrator Hedman at Region 5 said she was sorry about the memo and that she would vet and edit it, and Mr. Del Toral would not be working on this anymore.
Susan Hedman is regional head. she is still in her position. And I obtained those documents by email that showed that’s exactly what she said. And then the state went and was bragging to the Flint residents that no one was going to help them, that Mr. Del Toral had been, quote, “handled,” and they wouldn’t hear from him again. So it was at that point we launched, with ACLU Michigan and many, many other groups, a completely outside-the-system effort to determine the safety of Flint water and allow Flint residents to see whether it was meeting federal standards or not. So, we conducted a 300-bottle survey, and the residents did an amazing job. They returned more than 90 percent of the kits. And just as—when we started looking at those samples—this was late August—we knew there was no way that Flint’s water could be considered safe by federal standards. And on our webpage that we established to help the residents fight this battle, we announced that no one should be drinking Flint water. And, of course, the state didn’t like that.
Curt Guyette talking:
we started working with them and with groups, a coalition in Flint, and we all came up with the idea that we’re going to conduct our own test. And that was in August we did that. Virginia Tech sent 300 sample kits, because Dr. Edwards got an emergency grant from the National Science Foundation. And a small team of people worked to educate people about how to take water samples. We held public meetings, and people came. We distributed the kits. And then, within a three-week period, we tested about four times as many homes as the city had tested over the previous six months. And it was very rigorous. Records were kept. We were very diligent to see that all parts of the city were tested, unlike the city tests, which focused on areas where they knew they weren’t going to find lead. We were looking everywhere just to really honestly find out what was really going on, and did everything we could to make it bull-proof, because we knew that they were going to attack us, and we didn’t want to give them really any legitimate openings to question what we did. And so, we were working like crazy to get the kits distributed and collected and sent back. And Dr. Edwards and his team worked around the clock to analyze all these samples. And as soon as the samples started coming in and they saw that the levels were what they were and very disturbing, very alarming, they started putting the information out. And again, all along the way, the status—the approach taken by the MDEQ was to deny there was a problem. Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
Marc Edwards talking:
on December 22nd, Brad Wurfel, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, MDEQ, was presented with documents acquired by Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards, and denied the connection between Flint’s water and high blood lead levels.
it was really shocking, after all that occurred, to hear Mr. Wurfel say that. So, you know, I hope he was taken out of context. But on the other hand, it does sort of illustrate the state’s sort of illogic throughout this whole event, especially this small cadre of MDEQ employees who have misled really everyone, including—as a result of that email that was sent, the state did a quick assessment of what was occurring in the blood lead of Flint’s children, and they found increased levels after the switch, but they didn’t believe the results, because, at least according to my interpretation, MDEQ was insisting that there was nothing wrong with the water. So, this small group of employees has really tried to head off every effort to protect Flint’s children, whether it came from outside or inside the state government.
the harm that was done to Flint’s children and to their pipe system really cannot be undone. I think everything that’s been done recently to reduce the corrosivity of water is what needs to be done. It’s not until, however, Flint passes a federal Lead and Copper Rule sampling, that actually follows the law—the last two sampling events broke the law in many different ways; that’s another thing that allowed the state to say the water was safe when it wasn’t—until that happens, no one can really assess the safety of Flint’s water. Our position is that until they pass a legal Lead and Copper Rule monitoring round, the water has to be assume unsafe.
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Curt Guyette
investigative reporter for the ACLU of Michigan. His work focuses on emergency management and open government.
Marc Edwards
professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech. He led the research team that tested hundreds of water samples from Flint residents, uncovering the city’s lead problem.
— source democracynow.org