On Flint’s shaken faith, and its children’s future
A reporter’s notebook from Lizzie O’Leary of Marketplace Weekend
After my third day in Flint, I called my mom.
I’d spent part of the day with Phillip Liddell and his kids inside their apartment. There were cases of water stacked by the door, and Liddell’s three kids, two grandkids and a neighbor were bouncing around the place.
They ate bowls of ramen as a snack, and twelve-year-old Savannah showed me how to work the lead filter on their kitchen sink. They teased each other. Talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They were just so … happy.
All I could think about on the drive back to my hotel was what adults had stolen from them. It’s hard to know for certain, but Flint’s poisoned water may have cost these kids their future.
Lead is linked to a loss of IQ points, impulsiveness, and trouble controlling your emotions. Its effects are insidious, and can take years to manifest.
And it’s not like these kids have it easy. Their father dotes on them (pictures and trophies are everywhere in the apartment), but they live in a poor and often violent city. Contrasting their sweetness and hope with what I know is in front of them gutted me.
That’s why I called my mom. I’ve covered a lot of tough stories. 9/11. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The BP oil spill. Waves of foreclosures and lost homes in the recession. I’ve had people cry into my microphone. But there’s something about Flint, and how its water crisis hurts the most vulnerable, that feels like such an abnegation of responsibility. A breach of the social contract. And what adults owe to kids.
We don’t know who made the decision not to use corrosion control chemicals in the water from the Flint River. Maybe it wasn’t even one person. Somebody this week told me he thought it was “misfeasance not malfeasance.” But the result was highly corrosive water that pulled lead from pipes into the city’s system. Eighteen months of kids consuming it. And government officials who repeatedly told people it was safe.
When you drive around Flint, you see houses with boards on the windows, or vacant lots. It’s not unlike a lot of industrial cities where the industry up and left. And invariably, people will ask, “why don’t they leave?” People asked in New Orleans, and it’s bound to come up again. One father, Kenneth Madison, told me he knew people who were talking about it. But in many cases, I suspect people either won’t have the money, or won’t want to.
One thing I’ve seen after disasters is that people tend to want to stay and help their home towns, even at their worst. Maybe this will happen in Flint, I don’t know. Of all the people I’ve interviewed here, only one told me that she still has trust in government. Remember, the government here (federal, state and city) told citizens the water was safe. They browbeat a local doctor who found high lead levels in kids’ blood tests. Same for researchers (including one EPA employee), who showed how dangerous things were. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly this has shaken people’s faith in institutions here.
Honestly, right now, I don’t blame them.
Follow Lizzie: @lizzieohreally
