Just how many lead pipes are there in Flint, Michigan, where the water has been undrinkable because of high lead levels? The agency that provides assistance to people in need, including counseling, substance abuse treatment, foster care and adoption services. MI officials, however, expressed skepticism about the “data” collected by health researchers in Flint.
Advertisement
The Michigan Legislature is poised to approve $28 million in additional funding to address the lead contamination of Flint’s water.
State environmental regulators failed to ensure the new water was treated properly, which led to lead from pipes leaching into the supply.
Tiana Lankford didn’t know to be anxious about her baby last fall. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, voters across the nation want to see more clean energy deployed”.
“Often, its people have faced the temptation to lose hope, to surrender to despair”.
“I think it’s going to be a long time before bottled water isn’t needed”, Amber MacKenzie of the Red Cross said. It’s a man-made catastrophe affecting real people and endangering a real community.
Flint’s water became contaminated when the financially-struggling city switched from the Detroit municipal system and began drawing from the Flint River in 2014 to save money.
According to the 2015 annual water quality report, the water delivered to residents in the city met all Environmental Protection Agency and State drinking water health standards.
“It’s not about just moving money”, he says. A top reason for continuing to use lead service lines instead of immediately digging them up is that utilities can treat water so it forms a coating on the interior of the pipes – a corrosion barrier that helps prevent lead particles from dislodging and traveling to your faucet.
Residents also were exposed to chemical byproducts, E. coli and Legionnaires’ disease in the water. A Detroit news website called the Motor City Muckraker obtained information that revealed DWSD made several offers to sell Flint water at reduced rates that “would have saved the city $800 million over 30 years”.
“Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if almost 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line?”
“This is about continuing to take action”, Snyder said at a news conference earlier Wednesday. Lessons from FlintAvirgan: As someone who writes about health policy, are there next steps that we can learn from Flint, things that we need to be aware of in our relationship with science, regulation and health that resonate with other communities and other issues?
Anna Maria Barry-Jester: If you have so many residents testing with such high lead levels, the residents really felt like, “Well, why didn’t they tell us that?” Filters were then installed at its facilities.
“Six months ago there were no cameras and a small group of concerned citizens, plus one ACLU reporter, sat in a church basement with 300 test kits from Virginia Tech”, Melissa Mays, also a plaintiff in the suit, and co-founder of the Flint grassroots group Water You Fighting For, said on Wednesday’s press call. No one told her there was lead in the water.
In his 1970 preface to the book, We Charge Genocide, Ossie Davis wrote: “We will submit no further to the brutal indignities being practiced against us; we will not be intimidated, and most certainly not eliminated. It took a doctor having to do a blood test”, she added.
The state of MI is working to map out exactly where the old lead pipes are in Flint so it can “come up with the proper priorities about how we replace that infrastructure”, Snyder said.
Advertisement
Nearly as an act of racial/political subjugation, Snyder has used his power to appoint emergency managers who have total autonomy over Flint. Even Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, initially reluctant to investigate the authorities, was shocked by this and said, “Words can barely describe this tragedy”.
