Close to Flint, contamination leaves Detroit school taps dry
DETROIT — For a year now, Marcel Clark, a Detroit police officer and father of three, has been filling a 50gallon drum each week with purified water for his family to drink. Ever since he heard about the water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., an hour’s drive away, he hasn’t trusted the aging copper and steel pipes in his house. He’s been talking to contractors about replacing them and hopes to get the work done in the next few months.
“As a responsible parent, I said to myself, ‘Let me go ahead and secure my family,’ ” said Clark, 48.
But his children might have been exposed to tainted water anyway — at school.
The water fountains in all 106 schools run by the Detroit Public Schools Community District have been dry since classes began in August. The superintendent ordered them shut off as a pre-emptive measure, after testing revealed elevated levels of copper and lead in drinking water at some schools. After completing checks at 86 of the schools last month, officials announced that 57 of them had lead or copper levels above the federal thresholds that require action to be taken.
The situation has set parents on edge in Detroit, 60 miles southeast of Flint, where contaminated water sickened residents while officials dismissed their concerns for months, insisting that the water was safe. Flint’s crisis prompted Detroit officials to start testing school water supplies in 2016.
After the Flint crisis erupted, Michigan stepped up blood testing of children for elevated lead levels. A report by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services found in 2016 that a higher percentage of children under 6 had elevated levels in Detroit than in any other Michigan county — nearly 9 percent, compared with a statewide average of less than 4 percent.
“We are a baby Flint — or a Flint coming,” said Aliya Moore, an artist in Detroit. One of her daughters, Chrishawna Jefferson, is a junior at Cass Technical High School, where water tests last month found high levels of copper and lead.
In Detroit, officials and water quality experts say, the issue may simply be aging pipes. Much of the thousands of miles of plumbing in the city’s schools is decades old.
Detroit officials now say a solution is at hand: a $3 million project to put filtration systems in every school, paid for mostly by philanthropic donations. Installation of the first of 800 new “hydration stations” — drinking taps equipped with filters to remove contaminants — began last month.
“It should have never gotten to this level of the game,” said Barbara Cannon, 67, who packs bottled water for her grandson to school. “Up in Flint, Mich., the water is really poison. I hope it doesn’t get to that point in Detroit.”