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Wednesday might be tough,” he said, suddenly reversing course. “I’m going to be in D.C. on Wednesday to meet the new pope.” Huh? I looked over at Andy and Senator Ananich, then across the table at Jenny. Did he really just say he was meeting the pope? “This couldn’t be more urgent,” I went on, ignoring his bizarre non sequitur. “We need to get moving and declare a health advisory as soon as possible, so we can get some proper action by the feds and the state. Every day counts. That’s why we need to hear by Wednesday.”
As soon as I began talking, though, one of the group’s members, an older physician, confronted me. Without a sense of what she sounded like, she complained that Flint residents didn’t pay their water bills—and predicted this water thing would just encourage more of that, which would cause the doctor’s own already high water bills to rise even more. My mouth agape, I pretended she hadn’t said that—how could she say something like that?—but Dr. Reynolds wasn’t so forgiving. He got on her for her remarks, while Pete Levine masterfully kept things moving with adept political and diplomatic skills.
Before bed, Kirk texted us all to report that Mayor Walling had called him at home, wanting to talk. The mayor had been ruminating and was full of justifications. “Everybody knows they’re supposed to flush the water,” he’d said. Kirk objected and pressured him to stand with us. But the mayor felt it was unnecessary.
I checked my phone. It was noon. Nothing. The deadline had passed.
Aron Sousa called me directly with a response: nobody from the university would be attending. “Okay,” I said. “The university supports you as a member of the faculty,” he went on to explain, “but it cannot support your research.”
I took Liam’s baby bottle out of my bag. I walked out into the hallway, to a small bathroom across from my office. I filled the bottle with Flint water. It looked okay, pretty clear. But that wasn’t the point. The point was what our eyes couldn’t see.
We were in a numbers war. But the numbers were kids—real kids.
Suddenly an idea came to me—a way to prove the state wrong and at the same time improve my own work. It involved the use of zip codes. For our study, Jenny and I had discovered that even if a child had “Flint” in her address, it didn’t necessarily mean that her house was receiving Flint water. Flint zip codes included kids who were not getting Flint water, and if they were included in a study, it diluted the harm.
On Friday morning, the day after our press conference, the mayor’s office issued a “lead advisory.” I had no idea what that meant, but it was a good start. Finally, people would be informed. And I was thrilled to hear that the brand-new superintendent of the Flint Community Schools had unilaterally decided to stop allowing the kids to drink the water in school. When it comes to protecting kids, pediatricians and educators are almost always on the same page.
The state’s single-minded mission to distract and deny had caused it to miss the fact that its own summary data—made public—confirmed my study rather than undermined it.
A list of demands gives your advocacy mission focus and direction. Otherwise, you could waste all the time and energy you spent getting to the bargaining table.
Wurfel stayed on message and continued to try to discredit me. With the release of my research, the water controversy in Flint was reaching “near-hysteria,” he said. There it was again, the sexist hysteria, the word used against Alice Hamilton. I wore the insult like a badge of honor.
When Toledo had had a water issue less than a year before, water trucks arrived in less than twenty-four hours. Where was the sense of urgency here? We wondered why the state didn’t send support, but then we realized that sending in relief at such a large scale would be an admission of blame.
We worried about long wait lines. We worried about running out. We even worried about riots. Flint residents were rightfully angry. But the lines moved quickly, peacefully. The filters were distributed. It was happening, finally happening. At the time, I thought it might be the most we could hope for. I sent Jenny a text. ME: Jenny, we did it. Kids are going to be protected.
We found out later that in January 2015 state officials, while telling Flint residents that their water was safe to drink, were arranging for water coolers to be delivered to the Flint State Office Building so state employees wouldn’t have to drink from the tap. We found out later that as early as March 2015, the governor’s office was exploring the distribution of water filters in Flint. Later it finally worked with two companies to donate to the Concerned Pastors for Social Action, which began handing out filters on September 1. At that time the state was still officially denying the water
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We found out later from the emails that as early as December 2014, red flags were being raised about a strange escalation in cases of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe, often lethal lung infection caused by waterborne bacteria sometimes found in water towers of hospitals, hotels, and large institutions. The number of Legionnaires’ cases quadrupled after the water switch—also related to the lack of corrosion control—yet nothing was done. Two top staff in the governor’s office were notified as early as March 2015 and recommended action, yet no action was taken and the issue didn’t become public
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At the EPA, when asked about using federal money to buy water filters for city residents, the Region 5 Water Division chief, Debbie Baltazar, wrote to the regional administrator and others, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.”
Sometimes it is called racism. Sometimes it is called callousness. And sometimes—when the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that left at least twelve people dead was tied to the water switch, something the bureaucrats knew about for a full year—it can be called manslaughter.
KIRK: 3 elementary schools, 1 over 100 ppb ME: Holy shit KIRK: watching live. Heartbreaking. ME: I’m watching now. I hate them. I should have been happy about the water switch, but how could I be? Three schools with toxic levels of lead.
It happened at 5 P.M. on October 16. With a simple flip of a switch, noncorrosive water once again flowed into the taps of Flint homes.
The onslaught of misinformation and lies began. First, MDEQ blamed the high water-lead levels in the schools on the school fixtures. Then Nick Lyon stepped up to the podium and stated unequivocally that since October 1, 2015, forty-three kids had been exposed to lead. He had a number. It was forty-three. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had he really said forty-three? How had he arrived at that wholly inadequate number? Who had given it to him? It was outrageous—medically ridiculous—to announce that only a few dozen kids had been exposed. The time frame was way, way off. By October 1,
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Babies and children under one were not even tested, and when they were, it was well after the exposure was realized, and often too late for the lead to show up in their blood. Every kid had been exposed. Or, 8,657 had, to be exact, according to the census.
A child fully loaded with certain nutrients—especially iron and calcium—is less likely to have ongoing lead absorption and lead settling long-term in their bones.
“Everybody knows that this [water crisis] would not have happened in predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor,” Michael Moore wrote in Time. “Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns…. “This is a racial crime. If it were happening in another country, we’d call it an ethnic cleansing.”
in March 2016 released a kickass 112-page report. It fixed blame for the failure of government primarily on MDEQ, but it didn’t spare the governor, the emergency managers, or the MDHHS. The report stated very clearly that the demographics of a community—race—had played a role in creating this environmental crisis. And it stated that race had kept the crisis going long after it should have been stopped. The Five Guys explicitly connected the Flint water crisis to the emergency manager law. And in this way, the report was historic. Never had a government report explicitly stated the role of race
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Admitting your mistakes, and then doing what you can to rectify them, takes integrity and strength. And in the end, I felt the governor cared—and was truly sorry.
The criminal complaint against Lyon included a reference to his email to subordinates, asking them to make “a strong statement with a demonstration of proof that the blood-lead levels seen are not out of the ordinary.”
On our way to the hearing, Marc was stopped by a woman who recognized him. She had graying hair and looked worn and tired. She said she was an activist in D.C. and had a son who was a baby during the lead exposure. A teenager now, the boy’s learning and behavioral problems were significant. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wonder if it was the D.C. water that impacted my son,” she said, then thanked Marc for his work.
The most important medication that I can prescribe is hope.
