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In Flint, bad tap water runs politically deepBy Janell Ross https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/14/in-flint-bad-tap-water-runs-politically-deep/January 14, 2016

Ahmirah Porter, 9, stands silently behind a sign that reads "I've been poisoned by policy," as she joins more than 150 activists demonstrating outside of Flint City Hall on Jan. 8 to protest Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's handling of the water crisis. (Jake May/Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP)

In October, officials in Flint, Mich.,   finally admitted the city's water supply had problems .

The residents of this economically beleaguered,   majority-black city of about 99,000 , just more than an hour north of Detroit, had lodged   complaints about the water's smell, taste and look   for months . Potable tap water does not generally carry with it the fragrance of the local public pool nor the flavor of metal. It does not carry a distinctly blue or yellow color . It is also not generally regarded   as a potential cause of widespread skin rashes or viewed with enough suspicion that one local pastor refused to perform baptisms in it. Certainly not here in the United States.

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But the water coming out of Flint's taps did all of the above after city   officials (more on that later) switched from a more expensive water supply in Detroit to a plan that involved pulling and treating water from the Flint River . Then, after that switch happened and the complaints began, a local pediatrician --   followed by state health officials -- found that levels of brain- and bone-damaging lead in the bodies of a large number of Flint children was simply too much to   be ignored. But   there's also some evidence to suggest that state officials knew about the lead problem, as early as July.

Last week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) declared a state of emergency, noting that the water poses an immediate threat to public health and safety, just after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would investigate the situation in Flint. Synder's declaration also makes Michigan eligible for federal aid.

This week, Snyder has called out the National Guard based in Saginaw, Mich. The troops will, as the M-Live.com put it, "staff fire stations here, freeing up members of the American Red Cross so that they can assist with door-to-door distribution of water and water filters." And, now, there is news that a cluster of 10 deaths in and around Flint due to Legionnaires Disease might have been caused by the city's water.

This much is certain: There is a lesson in Flint for us all.The failure, underperformance or utter treachery of any government may be a juicy-subplot

to the reality show sometimes masquerading as as the 2016 presidential race. And the slow line at the DMV remains something about which strangers everywhere can and do commiserate. Government has, for some Americans, been a purely villainous force since at least the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan declared government to be the actual problem.

And people have a right to that view. But the situation in Flint highlights the very-real limits of reducing both the size and cost of government at every turn, of making savings the organizing principle of government.   Money truly is not everything, even in a poor city in one of the richest countries in the world. When it is, the crisis in Flint is one possible result.

Flint is one of those economically hard-hit Midwestern cities, left in a constant state of crisis or quandary. From a distance, those fights can seem philosophically engaging: the stuff of good dinner party conversation and debate for people in the know, who also happen to live elsewhere. But on the ground in Flint, this has required sad and even terrible choices, all types of cutbacks and then a state declaration that none of this was enough.

Snyder used a state law to appoint an emergency manager, a process that began in 2011.   And along with the emergency manager came a board to whom the manager could appeal to override decisions made by Flint's non-partisan, elected city council. In short, Flint has spent years under emergency manager control, a person whose primary charge appears to have been cutting costs.

That same emergency manager, Darnell Earley, has denied that he is responsible for the current crisis . He says the Flint City   Council voted to make use of the cheaper water

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supply from the river as part of a larger plan to join that new regional water system. He says he privately objected to using Flint River water, but local reporters did not find a mention of switching the city's water supply to the Flint River in the related council resolution .

And when The Fix spoke briefly with Flint Ward 2 Councilwoman   Jacqueline Poplar Wednesday, she could not have been more emphatic. The city council never voted to approve the shift in the city's water supply. Never, she said. And with that Poplar advised The Fix Earley is now the emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools and wished us goodnight.

Whoever is responsible, this was the reasoning for the water-source change: It seemed Flint could save $8.5 million over the course of the next few years if did two things . It would join a new regional water system under construction. That system's 2016 fees were expected to come in at about $3.5 million less than those Flint would have paid for water from Detroit. In the interim, the city would turn to the local Flint River for a short-term water supply. That was supposed to save another $5 million.

… And when the water from the Flint River started flowing into Flint homes, it carried with it components so corrosive they are suspected to have leached metals from the water system's pipes….

The state of Michigan has already pledged $12 million to deal with Flint's water crisis and $1 million just to help supply the town with bottled water and lead filters for homes. Flint itself had to commit $2 million to the work of reconnecting to a safer water source out of Detroit. Distribution of information and bottled water are essential, but not free. And somewhere, in some back room, lawyers for the city, state and probably some Flint residents have to be talking over the entire situation while logging billable hours.

Then, there is the almost immeasurable human toll.Lead is toxic to the brain, particularly for young developing minds. People who have

been exposed to unsafe levels of lead have serious difficulty controlling impulses, retaining information and learning in school or holding thought-intensive jobs. Lead can cause miscarriages, stillbirths and premature arrivals. It can damage the ability of the body to take in the nutrients needed for cell development and the growth of strong teeth and bones. The damage lead does to the body -- specifically the brain -- is irreversible. And we are talking about a community where 8 percent of the population -- nearly 8,000 kids -- are under age   5 ….

This is how toxic Flint’s water really is

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By Christopher Ingraham https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/15/this-is-how-toxic-flints-water-really-is/

January 15, 2016

The city of Flint, Mich., is in the midst of a water crisis several years in the making. The city   opted out of Detroit's water supply and   began drawing water from the Flint River in April 2014 , part of a cost-saving move.   Eighteen   months later, in the fall of 2015, researchers discovered   that the proportion of children with above-average lead levels in their blood had doubled .

The city reconnected to Detroit's water system in October, but the damage was done. Water from the Flint River was found to be highly corrosive to the lead pipes still used in some parts of the city. Even though Flint River water no longer flows through the city's pipes, it's unclear how long those pipes will continue to leach unsafe levels of lead into the tap water supply.   Experts currently say the water is safe for bathing , but not drinking .

A   group of Virginia Tech researchers who sampled the water in 271 Flint homes last summer found some contained lead levels high enough to meet the EPA's definition of "toxic waste ."

The researchers posted their test results online, which I represent graphically below with other visuals to help understand just how high above normal Flint's lead levels really were.

Lead in water is measured   in terms of parts per billion (ppb). If a test comes back with lead levels higher than 15 ppb, the EPA recommends that homeowners and municipalities take steps to reduce that level, like updating pipes and putting anti-corrosive elements in the water when appropriate.

But 15 ppb is a regulatory measure, not a public health one. Researchers stress that there is no 100 percent "safe" level of lead in drinking water, only acceptable levels. Even levels as low as 5 ppb   can be a cause for concern, according to the group studying Flint's water.

So let's start with Flint's neighboring cities. At the city level, public health officials are most concerned with the   90th percentile level of lead exposure in homes they test -- that is, 90 percent of homes will have a lead level   below this threshold, while 10 percent will register   above it .

Forty-five   minutes away from Flint in Troy, Mich., the 90th percentile level for lead in 2013 was 1.1 parts per billion . Not too shabby at all. In the graphics that follow, each splotch represents 1 part per billion. The splotches aren't proportionally scaled to the cups -- 1 part per billion is way too small to be visualized at this level. But all of the following graphics are scaled proportionally to each other, to give an impression of relative lead levels.

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 In Detroit, the water supply Flint had previously been connected to, the 90th percentile

reading was 2.3 parts per billion -- still highly acceptable .

 

Here's an illustration of water at the 5 parts per billion level. This is below the borderline for EPA acceptability, but the team of researchers studying Flint's water say that levels this high can be a cause for concern, particularly for young children.

 Now things get interesting. Here's a glass illustrating the 90th percentile reading

among   the 271 Flint homes tested by researchers last summer :

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 At 27 parts per billion, it's five times as high as the level of concern, and nearly twice as

high as the EPA's already-generous guidelines. According to the researchers who ran these tests, the health effects of lead levels this high "can include high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems, kidney damage and memory and neurological problems."

Recall, though, that 10 percent of the homes in the sample had lead levels even higher than this. Here's the highest lead reading in that sample, from a home in the city's 8th Ward:

 That's more than   10 times the EPA limit. It's 30 times higher than the 5 ppb reading

that can indicate unsafe lead amounts.But that 158 ppb reading is far from the worst one that turned up in Flint, unfortunately. In

the spring of 2015, city officials tested water in the home of LeeAnne Walters, a stay-at-home mother of four and a Navy wife. They got a reading of 397 ppb, an alarmingly high number.

But it was even worse than that. Virginia Tech's team went to Walters' house to verify those numbers later in the year. They were concerned that the city tested water in a way that was almost guaranteed to minimize lead readings: They flushed the water for several minutes before taking a sample, which often washes away a percentage of lead contaminants. They also made residents collect water at a very low flow rate, which they knew also tended to be associated with lower readings.

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So the Virginia Tech researchers took 30 different readings at various flow levels. What they found shocked them: The lowest reading they obtained was around 200 ppb, already ridiculously high. But more than half of the readings came in at more than 1,000 ppb. Some came in above 5,000 -- the level at which EPA considers the water to be "toxic waste."

The highest reading registered at 13,000 ppb.

 The professor who conducted the sampling, Dr. Marc Edwards, was in "disbelief.""We had never seen such sustained high levels of lead in 25 years of work," he said.According to Edwards, the team retested the water with extra quality controls and assurance

checks, and obtained the exact same results.You can check out their description of the testing at the website they set up for their water

study. It includes unsettling photos of LeeAnne Walters' tap water containing rust and metal particles large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

The Walters family had stopped drinking the water a long time ago, according to the Virginia Tech team. But still, the lead levels were too high. One of Walters' 4-year-old sons was diagnosed with lead poisoning.

It appears that the city of Flint and state of Michigan have finally started   to take the water problem seriously. Again, they reconnected the city to Detroit's supply back in October, but the water remains unsafe to drink.

In recent days the National Guard was activated to help distribute drinking water to the city's residents…

Flint, Michigan: Did race and poverty factor into water crisis?By Michael Martinez, CNNhttp://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/flint-michigan-water-crisis-race-poverty/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetworkJanuary 27, 2016

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(CNN) The contamination of drinking water in Flint, Michigan, has so outraged community advocates that they now pose a powerful question: Was the city neglected because it is mostly black and about 40% poor?

Several advocates say yes. They charge that Flint residents are victims of "environmental racism" -- that is, race and poverty factored into how Flint wasn't adequately protected and how its water became contaminated with lead, making the tap water undrinkable.

"Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes," the NAACP said in a statement.

Others go further. "While it might not be intentional, there's this implicit bias against older cities -- particularly

older cities with poverty (and) majority-minority communities," said Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, who represents the Flint area.

"It's hard for me to imagine the indifference that we've seen exhibited if this had happened in a much more affluent community," he said.

For the record, Flint is 57% black, 37% white, 4% Latino and 4% mixed race; more than 41% of its residents live below the poverty level, accordig to the U.S. Census.

NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks drew a direct equation between Flint's socioeconomic factors and the toxic drinking water.

"Environmental Racism + Indifference = Lead in the Water & Blood," he tweeted.State officials, however, vehemently dispute the claim."Absolutely not," Republican Gov. Rick Snyder told MSNBC. "Flint is a place I've been

devoted to helping. ... Several cities -- Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Saginaw -- I've made a focused effort since before I started in office to say we need to work hard to help people that have the greatest need."

For sure, "there were major failures here," Snyder added.But he blamed the crisis on incompetent bureaucrats, specifically citing "a handful of quote-

unquote experts that were career civil servant people that made terrible decisions," he said.Already, Susan Hedman, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's regional administrator

for Flint, Michigan, has resigned in the wake of the crisis.Brooks met with the governor Tuesday."His tone was one of remorse and regret and I took that to be genuine," he said. "I think the

residents and citizens of Flint will take the remorse of government to be genuine when they see safe, pure, quality water coming out of the tap."

Brooks is pressing for a definitive plan of attack."We're trying to take action that is specific, that's focused, that's urgent and speaks to the

people's needs," he said. "Talking with a deadline that has dollar symbols represents action, and that's what we're trying to do."

The matter has been discussed in social media, particularly by filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore.

Moore said the governor should be arrested for his role in the Flint water crisis. A state plan to save $15 million on Flint's water bills may now cost $1.5 billion in clean -up , Moore said in his online petition for help from President Barack Obama. … [Dunn cut some for space reaons]

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On Monday, state Attorney General Bill Schuette said he is appointing an ex-prosecutor and Detroit's former FBI chief to join the investigation into Flint's water crisis, creating a "conflict wall" between the state's inquiry and the lawsuits targeting the state… [Dunn cut rest for space reasons]