Poisoning the water ‘The Poisoned City’
2 books assess Flint’s public health crisis, GM’s role in it and the failure of authorities
Years before scores of children and adults were poisoned by lead-contaminated water in Flint, Mich., the city became shorthand for once-thriving American manufacturing centers hollowed out by corporate greed, suburban sprawl and industry’s failure to innovate.
The satirist and provocateur Michael Moore drew national attention to Flint’s plight with “Roger & Me,” his darkly funny 1989 film that was part documentary, part screed about the tragic decline of the Midwestern city where General Motors started making cars more than a century ago. Moore, who grew up in Flint, ostensibly was on a mission to interview then-GM President Roger Smith about the thousands of autoworkers laid off as the company shifted work to Mexico, used record profits to buy other companies, squeezed concessions out of labor unions, and shortchanged contributions to pension funds and medical funds for retirees.
With the Beach Boys hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” sardonically playing in the background, Moore interspersed images of boarded-up homes with news reports about Flint having more rats than people and, at the time, the highest violent crime rate in the nation. Later in the film, he cut back and forth between Smith reading his annual Christmas message and a sheriff ’s deputy evicting a laidoff GM worker. Bracing and brutally persuasive, “Roger & Me” is a post-Reagan primal scream for the working class left behind as the world changed rapidly around them. Unlike Donald Trump, Moore pins the blame on the real culprits behind the unsettling shift. The critic Roger Ebert hailed the film as a “breath of fresh air” that asked “whether the traditional American ethic of fair play between worker and employer has been replaced by a paganistic corporate worship of the bottom line.”
At one point, Moore offhandedly notes that the rat population exploded in Flint after the city cut back on garbage collection to save money. In her new book, “The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy,” Anna Clark briskly outlines how a series of decisions made by GM and public officials before and after “Roger & Me” led to a vastly more dangerous tragedy.
Flint was left to largely fend for itself after GM closed shop, Clark notes. There was no bailout of the kind politicians gave the auto industry and Wall Street banks during the Great Recession. Instead, Flint got a state-appointed emergency manager whose mission was to cut costs in a majority-black city that had rapidly deteriorated as its white suburbs grew larger and wealthier. In 2014, leaders announced they could squeeze savings by switching Flint’s source of drinking water from Detroit to a new authority that would draw directly from Lake Huron. Though nearly 80 percent of people working in Flint earn less than $40,000 a year, Clark notes, they pay some of the nation’s highest rates for water while living in the only state that touches four of the five Great Lakes, the world’s largest source of fresh surface water. Expensive water was a direct result of Flint’s shrinking population after GM closed many of its local auto plants, which also depleted the city’s tax base and its ability to make desperately needed repairs to its crumbling infrastructure. The city was broke. But “(r)ather than borrowing to invest in schools or public safety,” Clark writes, “Flint ended up paying for a pipeline
that literally paralleled the one that already existed.”
Because it would take a few years to build the new water distribution system, the emergency manager and other officials decided to draw water from the Flint River in the meantime. To make matters worse, they stopped adding required corrosion fighting chemicals to the water supply after they switched to a particularly corrosive source of water — a decision state officials signed off on and federal regulators
that they were inadvertently exposing their children to a toxic metal that today is considered unsafe at any level.
Lead causes permanent brain damage and can trigger problems with mental and physical health throughout life. After overcoming years of industry propaganda and bogus science bankrolled by General Motors and other companies that profited from lead, the U.S. has done an amazing job reducing levels in children during the past 20 years, mostly by banning the use of lead in gasoline, paint and plumbing. (GM cofounded Ethyl Corp., which for decades had the patent for tetraethyl lead added to gasoline.) Lead-based paint remains a persistent hazard in parts of the nation where older housing is in various states of disrepair. Flint, the birthplace of GM, drew national attention to the fact that in many American cities, everyone — all races and economic classes — is still at risk of lead exposure merely by turning on the tap for a glass of water.
Amid the crisis that unfolded after the water switch, heroes emerged. There were day-to-day acts of kindness and a renewed sense of community cultivated by faith leaders, nonprofit groups and researchers who flocked to Flint looking to help. LeeAnne Walters, one of the moms who demanded answers from public officials, called the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s office in Chicago and ended up reaching Miguel Del Toral, a regulations manager who drove to Flint to investigate. Del Toral identified potential health risks in February 2015, confirmed two months later that lead was leaching from corroded water pipes and summarized his findings in a June memo that Walters shared with Curt Guyette, one of the Michigan journalists who broke the story wide open.
In the spirit of the dedicated, determined scientists and physicians who documented how industry poisoned the world with lead during the last century, Mona Hanna-Attisha cut through the denials of Michigan officials who condescendingly insisted there was nothing to worry about in Flint, even after Del Toral’s memo became public. “Dr. Mona,” as she is known, is head of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, a public teaching hospital in Flint associated with Michigan State University. Her new book, “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City,” is a thoughtful, at times blistering meditation on how Hanna-Attisha’s own eyes were opened by the failures of public agencies created to protect public health, and by people who appeared to be more interested in saving their jobs than coming to grips with what had happened in Flint.
While weaving her own family’s story through the book — her parents are Iraqi Christians who fled during Saddam Hussein’s regime — Hanna-Attisha sheds new light on how she overcame bureaucratic and political resistance for a game-changing study that revealed the percentage of Flint children with high bloodlead levels had almost doubled after the water switch. Spurred on by a childhood friend who had worked for the EPA’s water office in Washington, HannaAttisha began pulling data and shared ideas with Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who had decamped to Flint with a team of students to test lead in tap water. HannaAttisha ended up subjected to the same kind of vicious attacks Edwards faced when he exposed lead contamination in District of Columbia water during the early 2000s. And after he found widespread problems in Flint.
Brad Wurfel, the spokesman for Michigan’s environmental agency, already had dismissed Del Toral as an EPA employee gone rogue, Hanna-Attisha notes. Edwards, the spokesman said, was “fanning political flames irresponsibly.” As for Dr. Mona, Wurfel told reporters, her findings weren’t just “irresponsible.” They were “unfortunate,” the spokesman said, repeating the technically true but incredibly misleading statement that “Flint’s drinking water is safe in that it is meeting state and federal standards.”
The rest of the nation has since learned those standards fail to require utilities to test properly for lead in water. Thanks in part to Flint, we’ve also learned the standards Wurfel and others hide behind aren’t based on the actual risks of lead in tap water. Instead, the EPA acknowledges, the arbitrary limit the agency established in 1991 was based on what water utilities thought they could reasonably meet without pulling lead service lines out of the ground.
Wurfel, whom Hanna-Attisha describes as a “rabid pit bull,” is one of the Michigan officials who ended up resigning in the wake of the Flint disaster. (He’s now a Lansing lobbyist.) Fifteen state and local officials, including Michigan’s chief medical officer, have been charged with various crimes for their roles in the water switch and the failure to notify the public of the dangers.
Big fights remain. Despite funding for expanded health services in Flint, the Trump administration continues to undermine the Affordable Care Act, and Republican leaders in Congress and the states are targeting Medicaid for deep cuts. Flint is removing lead service lines but not as fast as promised. The EPA continues to sit on recommended changes in national regulations on lead in tap water, largely because Congress and the states would need to come up with more money to replace lead lines in Chicago and other cities too.
“Sometimes I joke that I was born an activist,” Hanna-Attisha writes. “But it’s not really a joke. I was born into a family that was on the move toward something better, and I was born into a life knowing there is injustice in the world — and the importance of fighting it. And that’s exactly what my babies in Flint are born into ….
“For them, life is a struggle from the very beginning. That can make a baby a fighter. Because … sometimes things as simple as a meal or clean water or a bath can require a fight.”
The EPA is sitting on recommended changes in regulations on lead in tap water, largely because Congress and the states would need to come up with more money to replace lead lines.