The Flint Water Crisis

In April of twenty fourteen, Flint's state-appointed emergency manager switched the city's water source from Detroit's treated Lake Huron supply to the Flint River. The stated reason was cost savings. The city was in financial crisis, under state control, and the Flint River was cheaper.

What followed was one of the worst government-caused public health disasters in modern American history.

The Flint River water was significantly more corrosive than the Lake Huron supply. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors. As the caustic water moved through Flint's aging pipes, it leached lead from the pipe joints and fittings into the drinking water flowing into homes, schools, and businesses. Approximately ninety-nine thousand residents were exposed to elevated lead levels for more than a year before the crisis was publicly acknowledged.

Lead has no safe exposure level in children. It causes irreversible neurological damage, impairs cognitive development, reduces IQ, and increases rates of behavioral disorder. Flint's children drank it for months. Many of them will carry the effects for the rest of their lives.

The cover-up was as damaging as the contamination. State officials suppressed and disputed early evidence. A resident named LeeAnne Walters, whose children had developed rashes and health problems, pressed the Environmental Protection Agency for testing and found lead levels so high that federal hazardous waste rules should have applied. A pediatrician named Mona Hanna-Attisha compared blood lead levels in Flint children before and after the water switch and found they had doubled. When she released her findings in September twenty fifteen, state officials initially challenged her data. They were wrong.

The Flint River water also triggered a Legionnaires' disease outbreak that killed twelve people and sickened at least eighty-seven between June twenty fourteen and October twenty fifteen.

Former Governor Rick Snyder and other officials were criminally charged. All charges were ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds. No one went to prison. The residents of Flint received a settlement of six hundred twenty-six million dollars, the largest in Michigan history. The pipes are still being replaced.