The Poisoned City, page 12
The investigation gave a jolt to the coalition that had been campaigning for safe water.23 Yanna Lambrinidou, a leading organizer who helped bring the new research to the attention of Congress, told a Post reporter that the shameful 2004 report “gave the perpetrators of D.C.’s lead crisis a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” allowing them to escape accountability for their actions for too long.24 Ultimately, the CDC backpedaled, but it never admitted to conscious wrongdoing. It was all a miscommunication. “Looking backward six years,” said the deputy director of the CDC’s national center for environmental health, “it’s clear that this report could have been written a little better.”25
Edwards couldn’t let it go at that. He wanted the agency to admit that it had purposefully minimized the risk of lead in the water, perhaps because the CDC was worried about distracting attention from its long-running campaign against lead paint.26 Regardless, the crisis in the nation’s capital had real-world consequences. Two thirds of more than six thousand tested homes showed lead levels that exceeded the federal limit. Hundreds of children had elevated lead in their blood, which was associated with the water. About $100 million were spent on partial-line replacements until it came to public notice that children living in homes that received one were even more likely to test for high lead levels.27 And in 2014 Edwards published a study that showed a correlation between the lead-contaminated water and a spike in fetal deaths and reduced birth rates.28 There were about twenty to thirty more fetal deaths in the city for each year of the crisis. That was a jump of about 37 percent, even as the comparable numbers in nearby Baltimore were on a long decline. The rate of fetal deaths declined in 2004, when the lead problems became public and people began to take precautions, but they ticked up again during the years when pipes were partially replaced.
The whole episode took a toll on Edwards. Even with the validation that came from his MacArthur grant and the congressional investigation, he was shaken by how difficult the fight had been. There seemed to be enemies everywhere. People in power were working harder to protect themselves and their institutions than to do what was right, he felt, which seemed to him to be an utter betrayal of public trust. “Overall, this was a time of just incredible hopelessness for me,” he said. He was in his forties, but “so naïve” that never in his wildest dreams could he have predicted that the “scientists and engineers paid to protect us, the environmental policemen,” would become “environmental criminals” who hurt innocent people. “It just didn’t make any sense to me at all.”29
Believing that ethics was a crucial part of educating the next generation of scientists and engineers, Edwards teamed up with medical anthropologist Yanna Lambrinidou, the parent who was an influential organizer during D.C.’s lead crisis. They began teaching a path-breaking graduate course at Virginia Tech called “Engineering Ethics and the Public.” It was designed to prepare students, still at the sunny beginning of their careers, to act when—not if—they are faced with a moral dilemma. Uniquely, it emphasized the voices of marginalized communities that were affected by the decisions made by engineers. One of the signature assignments was to role-play the press conference that took place after the Post story broke, featuring representatives from the EPA, the CDC, the D.C. water authority, and other agencies. Armed with the same information those agencies had at the time of the actual conference, students found that they went so far in defending the office they represented, they sometimes invented information on the fly to counter questions they couldn’t answer.30
For all that Edwards, Lambrinidou, and many others had done to expose the D.C. crisis, nothing really changed afterward. No one was formally held accountable, not in a courtroom or anywhere else. Nobody was fired or demoted. There was no remediation, reform, or even any real apology. Even after the CDC finally backed away from the 2004 report, it admitted to being guilty only of bad writing. Meanwhile, water infrastructure across America was underfunded and in terrible condition, and nobody seemed to care. And the loopholes in the Lead and Copper Rule were still there to be exploited when utilities tested their water, in D.C. and in cities all over the country. People were unknowingly put at risk every day.
Edwards burned with a sense of betrayal. What it comes down to, he said, is “what are you loyal to in this world? Are you loyal to your friends, to your employer, or are you going to be loyal to the truth and humankind?” Every scientist and engineer must decide, not once, but throughout their careers.
Which is all to say that Marc Edwards could not have been more ready for LeeAnne Walters’s call from Flint, Michigan.
II.
From the switch to the Flint River to her son’s lead poisoning, LeeAnne Walters brought Edwards up to speed on the water crisis. Edwards knew that the only way to find out what exactly was going on in the water at her home was to test it. Although tests done by the city and the MDEQ had already shown excessive lead, Edwards was all too familiar with how the analysis could be manipulated. It was worth doing the tests again and making sure they were analyzed the proper way.
So in April 2015, following instruction from Edwards, LeeAnne collected thirty samples from her home. The water had been shut off at this point, so it had to be temporarily turned back on, and in this unusual case, since it had been sitting stagnant for weeks, it was necessary to flush the taps at low flow for twenty-five minutes the night before. Over the phone, Edwards talked LeeAnne through the whole process: she didn’t let the water run first, and she collected samples at a variety of flow rates—not the slow trickle that’s often used to lessen the likelihood of lead flaking from the pipes. The bottles were sealed and passed on to the EPA’s Miguel Del Toral, who, while traveling, personally dropped them off more than five hundred miles away, at Edwards’s lab in Dunham Hall at Virginia Tech.31
Within a week, the results were in. The sample with the lowest lead level tested at 300 parts per billion; the highest was more than 13,000 ppb; and the average was 2,000 ppb. The EPA classifies water with 5,000 ppb as toxic waste. Even the low test far exceeded the federal action level. As Edwards relayed to both LeeAnne Walters and Miguel Del Toral, it was the worst lead-in-water contamination that he had seen in more than twenty-five years.
The EPA had been told that Flint’s water was treated with corrosion control, and Del Toral had passed that assurance on to LeeAnne. But the only possible explanation for the state of her water was that it wasn’t. LeeAnne tracked down public documents that suggested as much, and after making more inquiries Del Toral confirmed their suspicions.32 Pat Cook, a drinking water official with the MDEQ, told him that Flint hadn’t had corrosion control since “the disconnection from Detroit.” As Del Toral wrote in an email, this “is very concerning given the amount of lead service lines in the city.”33
In the meantime, the city began to install a new copper service line to LeeAnne’s house. Del Toral seized the opportunity to examine the old line, confirming that it was made of lead. Downstream, he also retrieved a sample of galvanized iron pipe that had become coated with lead. Lead corrosion had flowed through it and stuck to the sides; if rust crumbled into the water, the lead would come with it.34
It was increasingly obvious that the MDEQ’s pat voice mail attributing the Walterses’ problem to indoor plumbing was wrong. The surge of lead had to be coming from outside—and that lead service line was the likely culprit. Since similar lines threaded through all of Flint, and since the contamination in the water at this house had hit hazardous waste levels, any rational person would wonder about the safety of the entire city’s water. Perhaps most damning of all for the MDEQ’s initial assessment were the results of tests done in May, after the new copper line was installed. The samples showed a dramatic improvement in the water. (The water heater still had high lead though, likely because it was still housing particulates from the old line.)
Elsewhere in Flint, tests were suggestive but spotty. A city test showed high lead at a house a few doors down from the Walters family. A mile away, another test found levels that were almost twice that. But at least two of LeeAnne’s neighbors did not have high lead (which is why the family had been advised to rely on the garden-hose connection).35
Altogether, though, there was enough evidence for Del Toral to feel that it was time to issue an alert. He synthesized the saga in an eight-page report titled “High Lead Levels in Flint, Michigan.” It was confirmation of the contamination in the Browning Avenue household and an indictment of the overall management of the water the city had been drinking for more than a year. The report also documented Flint’s problems with E. coli and TTHMs.36 Setting aside the MDEQ’s contradictory claims about corrosion control, Del Toral bluntly stated that after the switch from Detroit, Flint did not continue to treat the water in a way that would mitigate the lead and copper levels. It was both against the law and a threat to public safety.
Additionally, Del Toral’s report explained that the city’s water tests were unreliable. “The practice of pre-flushing … has been shown to result in the minimization of lead levels in the drinking water,” he wrote. “Although this practice is not specifically prohibited by the LCR, it negates the intent of the rule to collect compliance samples under ‘worst case’ conditions, which is necessary for statistical validity given the small number of samples collected.” Del Toral noted that the MDEQ supported the practice of pre-flushing. But Flint was now flirting with a public health emergency. He urged the EPA to intervene by reviewing the suspect sampling and the lack of corrosion control.
The report was addressed to Tom Poy, head of the groundwater and drinking water branch of the EPA in Chicago. Seven others were copied on it, including four MDEQ officials: Liane Shekter-Smith, head of the drinking water division; Pat Cook, the community drinking water specialist; and the ever-present Stephen Busch and Mike Prsyby. Two EPA water experts were also listed as recipients, as was Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards. When Poy followed up by asking why Del Toral was so certain that the lead problem was widespread, given the narrow set of tests, he was told that it was basic chemistry. “We don’t need to drop a bowling ball off every building in every town to know that it will fall to the ground in all of these places,” Del Toral wrote in an email. The only reason there wasn’t more data beyond LeeAnne Walters’s house was because “the City of Flint is flushing away the evidence before measuring for it.”37
Then he got even more pointed: “I understand that this is not a comfortable situation, but the State is complicit in this and the public has a right to know what they are doing because it is their children that are being harmed. At a MINIMUM, the City should be warning residents about the high lead, not hiding it telling them that there is no lead in the water. To me that borders on criminal neglect.”
When an employee writes a report like this, the EPA has a protocol. Its conclusion needs to be checked and rechecked before the agency signs off and releases a final version. Del Toral’s dispatch was thus considered an interim draft. But he couldn’t shake his worry about a looming disaster. Time was precious. If his analysis was correct, the corrosion of Flint’s pipes was worsening every day, causing more lead to saturate the water and more exposure to a dangerous neurotoxin.
That’s why he had sent copies to the people at the MDEQ who were directly involved with Flint’s water. And when LeeAnne Walters asked for a copy, he gave her one, too. She in turn shared the report with a journalist she trusted. The Flint water crisis, a local worry for more than a year, was about to move into the spotlight.
III.
Curt Guyette is tall and lean, with hooded eyes and gray-threaded brown hair that he’d tied back in a low ponytail for years but later cut short. He has a resounding laugh and an easy manner that belies the ferocity of his approach to mission-driven journalism—a mixture of skepticism of people in power, disdain for hypocrisy, and kinship with underdogs.38
Guyette’s was a familiar byline at the Metro Times, a Detroit alt-weekly that was distributed in Flint. For eighteen years, he turned out features about emergency management (“It’s Good to Be the King”), medical marijuana (“Cutting Through the Smoke”), and industrial pollution (“The Big Stink”). His pieces tended to be long, sardonic, and wonky, backed up with original reporting, punctured by colorful quotes, and displaying an unvarnished leftist point of view. Sometimes he wrote chatty interviews with people he simply found interesting: comedians, artists, kiteboarders, superfans of the Detroit Tigers. He once hiked the entire U-shaped span of Detroit’s Outer Drive, all forty-four miles of it, and produced a two-part series about his adventures. “I wonder what its bizarre and beautiful existence means to Detroit, if anything,” he wrote about the road. “I wonder what seeing it all by foot will mean to me.”
But his tenure at the alt-weekly came to an abrupt end when new ownership fired him in 2013 for revealing the contents of a company press release to another journalist a few minutes before the news was posted online. Soon after, Guyette signed on as an investigative reporter with the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the only branch in the country to have a journalist on staff.39 Guyette was the test case in a pilot program supported by a Ford Foundation grant, and he had a mandate to cover shifts in democratic governance under emergency management. He began work at an opportune moment: Detroit was just a few months into its municipal bankruptcy, and Flint was preparing to switch its water supply, both tremendous changes that were steered by emergency managers.
Guyette’s stories had fairly wide latitude to stake out his beat. His articles were published on the ACLU’s Michigan website, and occasionally in other local outlets, including the Michigan Citizen and, ironically, the Metro Times, which had yet another new owner and appeared to regret the loss of one of its best-known bylines. In winking self-acknowledgment, it named Guyette the “Best Journalist Who Worked at Metro Times” in one of its “Best of Detroit” issues.
Guyette’s reporting about emergency management led him to Flint and, inevitably, to the water wars. He was by no means the only reporter covering the story. Even in a region with a news infrastructure that had been devastated by layoffs, buyouts, and closures, beat reporters and local television stations followed the day-by-day developments. Even the New York Times had caught wind of the trouble. It published a feature that focused on Melissa Mays, a music promoter in her thirties who had become a prominent presence at water protests and public meetings.40 Like LeeAnne Walters, she said that she and her family had struggled with skin rashes and other ailments since the water switch. Her hair was falling out in clumps and lightening from brown to a brassy shade. After the boil-water advisories, the Mays family—Melissa, her husband, their three sons, and their pet cat and fish—used only bottled water. It cost them hundreds of dollars a month.
The article was featured on the home page of the Times website. But for all the media coverage, the story of the water crisis was stuck. Journalistically, it kept repeating itself. First came a disturbing news item about Flint’s water. Then came assurances from experts who said that it was fine and that treatment would improve. This in turn was followed by resident testimonials, demonstrations, and independent investigations that disputed the official claims. Then the cycle started all over again. It kept coming back to the fact that Flint residents were saying one thing about the water, and city and state authorities were saying another. It didn’t help that Michigan had some of the worst transparency laws in the country. Residents and reporters might have been able to help break the information stalemate by filing open records requests for internal details about Flint’s water switch, but they were limited by the fact that Michigan is one of only two states where both the governor’s office and the legislature were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Over at the ACLU, Guyette got together with Kate Levy, a local documentarian, to make a short film called Hard to Swallow: Toxic Water under a Toxic System in Flint. It was a six-minute recap of the water troubles that focused on the role of emergency managers. Resident activists were at the center of the story, including retired autoworker Claire McClinton, from the Democracy Defense League. “We knew that this emergency manager law was undemocratic,” McClinton said in the film. “We knew it was unprecedented. But we never dreamed that we would be faced with not being able to use our municipal water.” The film also included Melissa Mays, who said that she and her neighbors had heard for years about the pollution in the Flint River. When there was talk of using it as the community’s new source of drinking water, “we all thought it was a joke,” she said. And the Reverend Alfred Harris of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action testified that over at his Saints of God Church on West Pierson Road, they no longer conducted baptisms. “If we baptize, we go outside of the city of Flint.”
Emergency manager Darnell Earley made an appearance as he argued his case at a town meeting. “The work that has gone into preparing the City of Flint to eliminate its dependence” on the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, “that’s a major step, a huge step in the right direction, because that now gives you the opportunity to … better control the costs.” But residents were exasperated when water bills continued to get more expensive. Melissa Mays expressed alarm at how this would affect residents who couldn’t afford to pay them. “There’s no relief for your bills, you’re going to get shut off, and then everybody knows: you lose your water for ninety days, they cap your sewer, condemn your home, take your children.”
LeeAnne Walters spoke to the filmmakers as well. From her stoop, the stay-at-home mother precisely explained the problem: the change to a more corrosive water source, without adequate treatment, caused the protective coating in the city’s pipes to break down. This led to her son’s diagnosis. She showed his medical report on camera: “The LEAD level is abnormally high.”
