Who Poisoned Flint, Michigan?
On the south side of Flint in the summer of 2014, LeeAnne Walters had filled the above-ground pool that sat in the yard of her two-story home, with scraggly maple trees out front. She’d lived there for three years with her naval-reservist husband and their four kids, and they loved it. There were block parties and friendly neighbors; the children spent hours in the pool with their pals.
That summer was different. Her son Gavin would emerge from the water covered in red splotches. Doctors dismissed it as dermatitis and, briefly, scabies. But when the Walters hosted a pool party and everyone emerged red and inflamed, she knew it wasn’t just her son. On another day, she heard her 18-year-old daughter, Kaylie, screaming from the shower: “My hair is falling out in clumps!”
It made Walters think about her own thinning auburn hair. She did a survey of her brood – everyone was losing hair. Her water stank and was rust-colored. It was around that time that the city had to issue an E. coli warning, urging all residents to boil their water.
I met Walters in November. She wasn’t at her house the first time I stopped by, so I drove around the block and watched a Flint Water Department truck let a hydrant pump out gallons of orange water. “We’re just cleaning the pipes,” said the worker cheerfully. When I met Walters, she wore a hoodie and faded jeans. She’d been a medical assistant before becoming a full-time mom. She was struggling to understand why the government would do this to her and her family. She wasn’t an activist before, but circumstances had changed.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I started calling the EPA, looking up water on the Internet,” Walters told me as she fumbled with an unlit cigarette. “I had no idea how my life was going to change.”
This is where it gets complicated in a profoundly stupid way. To fight off concerning levels of fecal coliform and E. coli, the city kicked up the amount of chlorine pumped into the water system in the fall of 2014. This resulted in Flint water testing for an unacceptable level of total trihalomethanes (TTHM), a contaminant composed of four chemicals that come together when heavily treated water mingles with debris and garbage in a water system. Flint citizens went from orange water to complaining that their skin was on fire after showers. Still, the city said the water was safe, as long as you were not very young, elderly or had a severely compromised immune system.
An old friend disagreed, but for a different reason. General Motors announced it was discontinuing use of Flint water in one of its plants, because the high level of chlorides found in the polluted Flint River could corrode engine parts. So while the state was saying the water was still safe to drink, GM was saying it wasn’t safe to be used on car pistons.
Who Poisoned Flint, Michigan?, Page 4 of 12