Thirsty for Justice

The people of Flint knew that something was wrong with their drinking water — but were told by officials not to worry. It’s time to hold those officials accountable.

Last summer, I moved back to my hometown of Chicago to join NRDC as an attorney, with the goal of helping this stalwart organization further develop its Midwest environmental justice program. Remarkably, the very first issue I would be asked to help tackle was the water crisis in Flint, Michigan: a matter that has captured headlines around the world and has prompted a long-overdue conversation about the state of our nation’s water infrastructure — and specifically about the presence of lead.

The events in Flint have underscored for me two incontrovertible and inescapable facts. The first is that the effects of lead exposure on children are as avoidable as they are horrible — yet we’re not doing enough to avoid them. The second is that the children in this country who are being affected by lead are mostly kids of color who live in poor neighborhoods. As the crisis in Flint reveals, until a national media spotlight legitimizes an issue as one of “national concern,” environmental health threats in poor communities are too often ignored, and citizens’ concerns too often disregarded.

Make no mistake: But for the advocacy and organizing efforts of the city’s residents, particularly its mothers, the crisis in Flint would still be considered local news only. And these concerned parents would still be treated as marginal, dismissible “complainers” by state officials. Before the events in Flint made their way into the national news cycle — and even into the sound bites of presidential candidates — residents spent nearly two years doggedly trying to get the attention of local and state officials about concerns over water quality. For much of that time, no one seemed to be listening to them.

When water testing revealed alarming concentrations of lead in the water, that critical information wasn’t shared with the public. And when people began expressing their concerns about lead levels, government officials still claimed that the water was safe to drink. At the same time, however, back in January 2015 — one year before the State of Michigan admitted that there was a problem and declared a state of emergency over water safety — state officials were offering their own employees bottled water from coolers, to be consumed “as long as the public water does not meet treatment requirements.” In other words, the government was saying that the water coming out of faucets and fountains was good enough for the residents of Flint to drink — but not good enough for the people with capital.

Several months ago, NRDC was invited by members of the Flint community to help them in their fight for health and justice. And last week, NRDC, along with American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, demonstrated this support in the form of a lawsuit against state officials and the City of Flint for violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal law enacted in 1974 to ensure that water from our taps is safe to drink. Our clients include Concerned Pastors for Social Action, an association of local religious leaders, and Flint resident Melissa Mays, who — along with countless other Flint residents — have been at the forefront of this issue for nearly two years.

Background

By this point, the main story is well known. In April of 2014, as a cost-cutting measure, state officials overseeing a financially strapped Flint made the momentous decision to temporarily switch the city’s water supply from Lake Huron (purchased from Detroit, Flint’s downstate neighbor) to the Flint River. Almost immediately, residents began complaining about the foul-smelling, foul-tasting, and foul-looking stuff that was coming out of their taps and water fountains. Residents shortly thereafter began registering more complaints — this time, however, about the sick feeling that they were experiencing after consuming water they had all been told was perfectly safe to drink. Businesses were also troubled by the change in water sourcing; General Motors actually stopped using the water in Flint, for fear that it would corrode their manufacturing systems.

The word complaining has real significance here, since e-mails released by the state reveal that officials initially regarded the outcry as little more than that: petulant complaints from a community whose perpetually dissatisfied members were intrinsically “anti-everything.” The same officials spent months dismissing the oft-stated concerns of ordinary residents, characterizing the water situation as “near hysteria.”

However, as multiple tests would later confirm, and as our lawsuit alleges, these concerns were well founded. Water from the Flint River — which courses through the center of this once-vibrant yet now-struggling industrial city, past a number of shuttered automobile factories — was so highly corrosive when untreated that it was literally stripping the protective coating from the inside of pipes, allowing lead to leach and break off into the drinking water.

Lead

For many other toxins, there’s a threshold below which exposure is generally considered safe. Not so with lead. Lead is so insidious that health experts long ago concluded there’s simply no “acceptable” level that a person can sustain; it affects virtually every system within the human body. But while lead is certainly harmful to adults, the damage it can do to a fully developed person is nothing compared to what it can do to a child — specifically, to a child’s still-developing brain and nervous system. Even small amounts of lead in children have been shown to correspond to lower IQ, growth impairment, hearing impairment, and neurobehavioral disorders.

As a result of this failure, an entire generation of children in the City of Flint has been put at risk. And aside from the immediate health impacts, the long-term socio-economic impacts can be devastating. Studies have shown that lead exposure in a community corresponds to higher special-education needs and dropout rates, as well as to higher rates of school discipline and juvenile crime. The toxic water coursing through Flint’s pipes may well be carrying the city’s children directly into the aptly coined school-to-prison pipeline.

The threat posed by lead is real. At the same time, it’s also a powerful and disturbing symbol of how race and class continue to complicate our broader concept of environmental justice, and our capacity to treat all Americans equally. The simple truth of the matter is that lead, at present, poses much more of a problem for some people than it does for others. Low-income communities and people of color are far more likely than wealthier white people to live in older homes with lead pipes; these homes are also much more likely to be contaminated by lead paint, and to be located in neighborhoods near highways where even more lead settled in the soil in those decades before it was banned from gasoline.

When officials ignore the toxicity of entire communities, it ends up contributing not only to illness but to a cynicism that can infect and pervade all aspects of the relationship between citizens and the institutions charged with protecting them. It’s a shame when people express reluctance to get a blood test for themselves or a family member — all because they’ve simply lost trust in the medical doctors and officials who are administering these tests.

With so much attention directed at Flint right now, many Americans are understandably wondering whether the water coming out of their own faucets is, in fact, safe to drink. While this certainly is a legitimate concern, we can’t lose sight of the fact that government officials allowed thousands of mostly low-income, children of color to ingest water that they knew could be dangerously contaminated — and then dismissed the complaints of the community when residents inevitably began to speak up.

Lead exposure is entirely preventable. Failing to prevent it — whether it’s from lead leaching into our pipes, scaling off our painted walls, or settling into our soil on playgrounds — is more than a dereliction of duty. It’s a moral travesty.

Written with Jeff Turrentine