Polishing Off Flint

The decision to switch the city of Flint’s drinking water source to the Flint River was pegged as a cost-cutting maneuver aimed at saving $5m over a two-year period. But almost two years and a massive lead contamination crisis later, that move and subsequent decisions not to treat the water supply already carry a financial price tag of $45m and climbing.

[...]

[E]stimates [suggest] the price tag to overhaul Flint’s water infrastructure is between $750m and $1.5bn.

  Guardian

A price that will not be paid by the people responsible, but taxpayers of every state in the union and whatever donors can be rustled up.

Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine.

  New Yorker

They "figured"? They didn't find out?  And even if it were that, would they drink water from their faucets if it were rusty?  Rhetorical question.

Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” [...] “[T]he system is old”; “Flint is old”—the water, in a word, fit their picture of the city, in which about forty per cent of its hundred thousand people lived below the poverty line (and more than half are black). [...] [Flint] was scheduled to be connected to a new pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an Emergency Manager. [...] When that manager felt he couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades before.[...] In August, 2014, and again that September, the water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to disinfect it.

So much chlorine, it turns out, that it corroded pipes.

By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water.

[...]

Still, the memos from the governor’s office continued to dismiss “the rusty factor” as aesthetic. It might not be good enough for G.M.’s machines, but it was fine for people.The water, as the governor’s office told the public, was still, passing the tests—except in the case of one known carcinogen, TTHM, which was produced by the interaction of chlorine and that “organic matter.” The water wasn’t passing those tests, but it was close enough, and, anyway, since TTHM caused cancer after long exposure, but not within the few years people in Flint were being asked to drink it. The TTHM regulations, a memo to the governor noted, were only estimated to prevent two hundred and eighty bladder-cancer cases each year, “out of more than 330 million people,” and so “it’s not like an imminent threat to public health.”

[...]

Lead is an imminent and persistent threat to public health. [...] Lead stays in your bones even once it leaves your blood. And there were soon signs that the people in Flint were drinking lead. They weren’t told to stop using the water; indeed, for months, the opposite was the case.

[...]

The state and city seem to have ignored that basic lesson of epidemiology—they didn’t seem to register until recently, for example, that there had also been a spike in cases of Legionnaire’s Disease in Flint, which might also have had something to do with the water. Ten people died in that outbreak.

Let me translate all that to you: "These are poor black people, and frankly, the state would be better off if they didn't exist."

The various Michigan authorities continued to report that they couldn’t find anything unusual—certainly not lead, except maybe some “seasonal” spikes, or statistical flukes. At most, people should let their water run for a while before using it.[...] E.P.A. water expert named Miguel Del Toral [reported], “My point on that was that people are exposed to the particulate lead on a daily basis, but the particulate lead is being flushed away before collecting compliance samples which provides false assurance to residents about the true lead levels in the water.”

[...]

In June, 2015, the Detroit Free Press examined documents on the testing obtained by the A.C.L.U.; the paper reported that after Flint had collected only thirty-nine of an expected hundred samples, a D.E.Q. official wrote to let city officials know that those samples were looking high. Somewhat ambiguously, he expressed “hope” that the rest of the samples would be “below the AL,” or action level, for lead. Going above that level would put the department in the position of having to do something. [...] [A] quarter of the remaining samples “came from a single stretch of Flushing Road in Flint,” which had a water-main section only a few years old. “Not surprisingly, all of those samples measured very low for lead.” [...] And the testers still got the numbers under the acceptable level only by throwing out one sample that was extraordinarily high—over a hundred parts per billion.

And that household used a filter!

That sample had come from the house of Lee Anne Walters. The water from her taps was orange. Her twin four-year-old boys were sick—one of them weighed only twenty-seven pounds. Her daughter’s hair was falling out, and so were her own eyelashes. [...] When [her water] was retested, it measured almost four hundred p.p.b.

Well, surely, the city took action then?

The city suggested that she hook up a hose and use her next-door neighbor’s water instead.

The people of Flint should have been reporting their problems to their hometown boy, Michael Moore.

A group of researchers from Virginia Tech, led by professor Marc Edwards, began to do what the city and state had so avoided: asking whether the water was truly safe. One of the samples they took recorded a level of 13,200 p.p.b.: lead soup. [...] On September 24th, Doctor Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local pediatrician, announced that there had been a significant spike in the levels of lead in the children her hospital had tested. The state continued to say that its studies were better—more comprehensive.

[...]

President Obama has declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, with the National Guard bringing in bottled water. The city has switched back to Detroit water, but that doesn’t solve the problem of the pipes leaching lead.

If there aren't several Michigan officials in jail after this, there truly is no accountability. Life sentences for mass murder would not be out of order.

And why do Flint city officials - and even the governor of Michigan - still have their jobs?

Reminder: after the Paris attacks in November, this is what Governor Snyder had to say as a reason not to accept Syrian refugees:

"Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration. But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents." 

UPDATE: The smoking gun.

A high-ranking DWSD official told us today that Detroit offered a 50% reduction over what Flint had been paying Detroit.

The offer by DWSD shows that Gov. Rick Snyder was lying when he insisted the water switch was motivated by saving money for Flint, which was under the control of a state emergency manager.

“When compared over the 30 year horizon the DWSD proposal saves $800 million dollars or said differently – saves 20% over the KWA proposal,” then-DWSD Director Sue McCormick said in the e-mail dated April 15, 2013.

[...]Documents show that DWSD made at least six proposals to Flint, saying “the KWA pipeline can only be attributed to a ‘political’ objective that has nothing to do with the delivery – or the price – of water.”

[...]

Saying he was sorry for the mistake, Snyder pledged full transparency during his State of the State address last week and released e-mails related to the water crisis from 2014 and 2o15. Curiously, he refused to release e-mails from 2013, which would have showed why state officials decided to make the switch from DWSD to the KWA.

Now it seems clear why Snyder wouldn’t release the e-mails: They would have revealed that the switch was not about saving money.

[...]

So what was it about? Some have suggested that Snyder was motivated by a desire to break up DWSD and ultimately privatize it. In the summer of 2015, DWSD was split into two entities: the DWSD and the Great Lakes Water Authority.

Others have suggested that Snyder wanted to start fracking operations along a new pipeline. Snyder’s office didn’t return calls for comment.

  Motor City Muckraker