First, as a registered professional engineer employed by a water utility, I want it understood that I speak only for myself, not my employer.

Many would like to assign problems like this to racism, poverty, Republican austerity measures, or whatever cause dejure they can contrive. The issues are really much more basic than that.

There are two key aspects with what happened at Flint. The first is technical. Others have covered this story, so I won’t go over it here.

A side note: to those of you know very little about water utilities, we’d love to rip and replace everything. Most, when they become aware of how expensive and disruptive this would be, and how little this would actually fix, opt for less expensive options.

The second is political. It is an issue of who was actually responsible for what. It is notable that there were no professional engineers responsible for the entire system. Decisions were made in terrifying ignorance not to correct the pH, or to inject corrosion inhibitors in to the water supply.

Nevertheless, the water from the treatment plant itself probably was safe to drink. It was the trip through the distribution pipes that caused most of the problems. Thus it is not hard to imagine that everyone thought they were doing their jobs adequately. I like to call such behavior “saving money at any cost.”

This is the sort of thinking that has lead to many disasters: If you smear the responsibility thinly across enough people, bad things can happen that aren’t attributable to any one person’s actions. In other words, it’s not just austerity measures that caused this. In an organization such as these, one can throw money at all kinds of places and it still won’t keep problems like this from happening.

The financial people don’t understand the false economy of what they’re asking the technical people to do, and the technical people do exactly what they’re being paid to do without considering the larger picture.

The failures of multiple safety systems at the Deepwater Horizon is an example of this. They didn’t spend any effort to check their safety systems for proper operation before deploying it on the sea floor. In retrospect, this is false economy. But try explaining that to someone who is counting dollars for every minute spent.

The recent failure of the secondary spillway of the Oroville dam was another. These disasters occurred because many people were focused on only their part of the picture without considering the whole system.

This brings me to government. There were state agencies and federal agencies who could have stepped in earlier. For whatever reasons, none of them did anything until there was a major disaster in front of them. I guess they’re there to prosecute offenders, not help anyone. Once again, if you spread responsibility thinly enough, you can’t point the finger at anyone.

This kind of thing happens in all large organizations, whether it is government or private industry. Unless there is a city engineer responsible for investigating and reporting the condition of all infrastructure to the people of the city, problems like this will continue to happen. It would be no different than a bureau responsible for tracking where the tax money goes.

We can throw all kinds of tax money at problems like this. It won’t solve anything unless we stop smearing responsibility all over the place and hold someone accountable.