On Saturday, President Obama declared a federal emergency in Flint, Michigan, freeing up $5 million to help the city deal with a water contamination crisis.
The city’s drinking water supply was contaminated with lead – risking permanent brain damage to potentially thousands of city residents. Why? The state-appointed manager of the city tried to save money by switching water sources, from Lake Huron to the more corrosive waters of the Flint River, which damaged city pipes.
Marc Edwards is an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech and an international expert in drinking water who has been investigating the case. He said the tragedy in Flint has lessons for Baltimore and other aging cities with neglected pipes and infrastructure.
“If you ever cut corners on your infrastructure, or protecting that infrastructure, you are destroying the very fabric of your civilization, of your society,” Edwards said. “I mean, people in Flint were afraid to take baths. And they are still afraid, to this day, because the water is so horrible. They’ve lost basic sanitation.”
Robert Glennon, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Arizona in Tuscon, said: “The maintenance of water systems and wastewater systems is not just an urban problem, or a problem for places with low-income residents. It’s a problem all over the nation that needs to be addressed,” Glennon said in an article in the Christian Science Monitor.
Baltimore is struggling with its own infrastructure crisis. On January 1, the city missed a federal deadline for repairing its leaky, overwhelmed sewer system, which continues to dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Inner Harbor and Chesapeake Bay. Over the last three years, at least 400 city homes have been flooded by sewage backups, putting residents at risk of disease.
A similarity between the problems in Baltimore and Flint is that – in both cases – government failed in its responsibilities to notify the public. In Baltimore, the Department of Public Works repeatedly failed to follow state law that requires public notification when there were overflows of more than 10,000 gallons of sewage into the Jones Falls, which empties into the Inner Harbor.
In Flint, city and state officials repeatedly reassured residents that it was safe to drink the tap water, even though it was discolored and loaded with lead.
Edwards said the first error in Flint was that the city and state – when they switched to the cheaper but more acidic water from the Flint River – failed to follow the standards set by federal drinking water law. These standards require the addition of a corrosion inhibiting chemical – a phosphate -- to prevent acidic waters from leaching metals -- including lead solder -- from old plumbing. This chemical was not added in Flint, Edwards said.
“Basically, the water ate up the pipes,” Edwards said. “And that set in sequence a chain reaction of events that resulted in everything from rusty, red water pouring out of people’s taps to rampant bacteria growth, because the corrosion was eating up the disinfectant in the water. It produced very high lead levels in the water…and it could very well have caused a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak, as well.”
Making the problem worse, Edwards said, Michigan environmental officials then misled the EPA by falsely claiming they had added the required corrosion-stopping chemical. Even when EPA learned about the failure, it failed to intervene or notify the public. A mother in Flint who was worried about the health of her child had to seek out Edwards as an independent expert and work with him. The mother and scores of other residents of Flint tested their own water, found dangerously high lead levels, and sounded the alarm.
“We worked in collaboration with Flint residents after we realized that the EPA and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality were completely covering this problem up,” Edward said.
Edwards examined 252 water samples from Flint homes and found that 10 percent had lead levels of at least 25 parts per billion, which is over the EPA allowed level of 15 parts per billion, according to a study posted on the Virginia Tech website. “This is a serious concern indeed,” Edwards wrote on the website. “Several samples exceeded 100 ppb, and one sample collected after 45 seconds of flushing exceeded 1000 ppb.”
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, issued an apology for the contaminated water. “I want the Flint community to know how very sorry I am that this has happened," he said in a statement. "And I want all Michigan citizens to know that we will learn from this experience, because Flint is not the only city that has an aging infrastructure.”
EPA officials said yesterday that they are reviewing their agency’s show response to the contamination. The agency said it was hampered "by failures and resistance at the state and local levels to work with us in a forthright, transparent and proactive manner," according to an EPA statement reported by Reuters. "Our first priority is to make sure the water in Flint is safe, but we also must look at what the agency could have done differently.”
The big picture is that the United States is spending billions of dollars overseas, while neglecting its own cities like Flint and Baltimore. Meanwhile, some politicians – like the governor of Michigan, and some Republican candidates for President -- relentlessly demand less government and lower taxes.
To some advocates, the poisoning of Flint’s children by their own government is a sign that it is time for the U.S. to start investing more in urban areas and clean water.
