The Contempt That Poisoned Flint’s Water

[kpete]

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. They wished, in fact, that the residents would realize how good they had it, when it came to the water’s substance, and stop complaining about its style. Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” The “aesthetics” (the word comes up several times in e-mails about Flint, which the governor released Tuesday night under pressure) were bad because “it’s the Flint River”; “the 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). Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit’s water system, which had Lake Huron as its source. It 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. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn’t matter if the residents were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water began to fail the tests. 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. It took a lot of chlorine—and that may be where Flint’s troubles really began. (NBC has a timeline of the crisis.) The city’s water managers, unaccountably, seem not to have added any anti-corrosion agents to the water. Nor did they check for corrosion issues in a way they ought to have for a city Flint’s size. (In a remarkable memo a year later, Brad Wurfel, the spokesman of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said that the staff had “made a mistake,” and followed the wrong protocol.) 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. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.

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.” The exchanges in the governor’s office continued to center around how to get one simple message out to the people of Flint: “residents should feel confident that their water is safe to drink unless the DEQ or City notifies them otherwise.”

Someone is to blame. When the state redid the tests, under a more watchful public eye, Flint failed; 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. What may lie at the heart of the tragedy, though, appears to have been a certain contempt. It was as if state officials thought that it was all a cultural problem, poor people being frivolous instead of drinking water that had long been, as one memo put it, “perfectly fine.” Really, what did they expect?

http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-contempt-that-poisoned-flints-water

[MisterP]

1. there's two countries that tell their subjects how lucky they have it and to stop complaining

America and North Korea