The Poisoned City, page 13
Hard to Swallow was released on YouTube and the Michigan ACLU’s website on June 25, one day after Miguel Del Toral had delivered his report. It proved to be a fortunate coincidence. The film strengthened Walters’s confidence in Guyette. And so she gave him a copy of Del Toral’s briefing.41 For the first time, a reporter was armed with hard data about the lead toxicity of Flint’s water, data that contradicted the MDEQ’s numbers.
With Del Toral’s analysis in hand, Guyette contacted city and state officials to get their side of the story. But his affiliation with the ACLU, an advocacy organization, prompted skepticism about how seriously to take him. An email between city employees discussing his interview request described Guyette’s role in Hard to Swallow, saying that it “somewhat discredits his objectivity.”
Another email from an MDEQ public information officer to Brad Wurfel, the communications director, had the same concern. “I got a weird call from a ‘reporter’ at the ACLU asking about Flint drinking water,” she wrote, adding that she felt almost positive that “it’s the same guy who used to work at Metro Times.” Guyette told her that he had a source at the EPA who said that “we use a ‘flawed methodology’ to collect our samples,” which led to lead levels being seriously underestimated. “Apparently the EPA and Virginia Tech sampled a house using a different methodology and found 13,000 ppb of lead.”42
Guyette followed up the next afternoon. “ACLU guy is back today,” the information officer wrote as she forwarded his email to Wurfel. But Guyette was not the only one being snubbed. Mayor Dayne Walling also inquired about the report after hearing from Guyette, and he asked the EPA’s Chicago office if he could get a copy of it. Susan Hedman, the head of the office, didn’t send it to him. Instead, she told him that the report was a “preliminary draft” that “should not have been released outside the agency” until after it had been “revised and fully vetted by EPA management.” That would take months.43
The MDEQ never did get back to Guyette, not even to say “no comment.” Despite the lack of cooperation, Guyette wrote a long story that ran on the ACLU’s website on Thursday, July 9. It linked to a full copy of the report and included an interview with Del Toral, whom he described as a “whistleblower,” although he wasn’t that, since he hadn’t reached out to a journalist himself or otherwise released his report to a public audience. And he had been purposefully transparent about his investigation all along, copying his EPA superiors at every step. Guyette’s article was packaged with a short video titled Corrosive Impact: Leaded Water and One Flint Family’s Leaded Nightmare.
In the leafy college town of Ann Arbor, at the headquarters of Michigan Radio, someone was watching.
It wasn’t long ago that Michigan Radio, the state’s leading public radio service, primarily broadcast classical music.44 In 2007, there were about five people on staff who gathered news. By the time Del Toral wrote his report, there were more than twice that, including reporters, digital producers, and on-air hosts. This upward swing was rare in journalism, but the station’s annual operating budget had also grown, in part due to rising listener support. Its programming reached about 450,000 listeners each week via transmitters in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Flint.
Michigan Radio had filed dispatches about Flint’s water—the switch from Detroit, the affordability crisis, the boil-water advisories and TTHMs, even features about, for example, an art installation that one resident made from plastic water bottles.45 The station was well situated to take the story further. But when reporters and producers read the report that Guyette published, they had a hard time believing it. “There was a disagreement in the newsroom,” the news director, Vincent Duffy, recalled. “Some wanted to get it out right away, and others in the newsroom were saying, ‘These numbers can’t be right. This can’t actually be happening that the lead levels are this high in a municipal water system.’ Turned out that actually was the case.”
On July 9, the same day the ACLU story ran, Michigan Radio’s Lindsey Smith reached out to the MDEQ. Brad Wurfel alerted a number of officials, including Stephen Busch, about her inquiry.
“Steve, I just got a call from [Michigan] Public Radio about an EPA notice to Flint about elevated lead levels in the water,” Wurfel wrote. “Apparently, you were cc’d on EPA’s note. Can you give me a call ASAP.”
“This is what Curt Guyette had been calling about, by the way,” wrote the public information officer a minute later. “Apparently it’s going to be a thing now.”
There was apparently some confusion about Del Toral’s report—not everybody at the MDEQ had seen it or realized that it had already been sent to four agency officials. The public radio reporter ended up emailing Wurfel a link to the ACLU site, which he in turn forwarded to his colleagues: “Miguel apparently asserts that the DEQ and EPA are at odds on proper protocol. Which seems weird. Let’s discuss!”
Stephen Busch replied to the thread. “Obviously we are not going to comment on an interim draft report,” he wrote.
But Brad Wurfel did do an interview with Lindsey Smith, discussing Flint’s water issues in a more general way. The segment was broadcast on Michigan Radio on Monday, July 13. It opened with a comment from Wurfel that would become infamous: “Let me start here—anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax.”46
In light of the state’s tests of nearly 170 homes in Flint, Wurfel said, the numbers at LeeAnne Walters’s home were outliers. “It does not look like there is any broad problem with the water supply freeing up lead as it goes to homes,” he said. He also told the statewide audience that anyone living in a house that was more than thirty years old should get their water tested, no matter what city they lived in.
But just as Wurfel was reassuring Michigan Radio listeners about the water, other people at his agency were noticing that the latest numbers were worrisome. Those 170-some tests cited by Wurfel were from the routine twice-a-year checks that are required by the Lead and Copper Rule. One hundred tests had been done in Flint at the end of 2014. The next batch was due by June 30, 2015. As the deadline neared, Adam Rosenthal, an MDEQ water expert, had emailed Mike Prysby and Stephen Busch: “We hope you have 61 more lead/copper samples collected and sent to the lab” and that they “will be below the AL [action level] for lead. As of now, with 39 results, Flint’s … over the AL for lead.” If the result held, it would trigger a series of requirements, including public notification and active steps to reduce the lead.
After a lot of last-minute scrambling, the MDEQ allowed the city to drop the number of samples from one hundred to sixty on the grounds that Flint’s population had slipped to fewer than one hundred thousand people.47 The city turned in a total of seventy-one. As usual, collectors had been instructed to pre-flush the water. They also sidestepped the EPA guideline to focus on high-risk locations—that is, homes that are likely to be serviced by lead lines, where contamination would be expected to be more severe. Flint couldn’t easily find those homes even if it wanted to, since the records on the location of lead pipes were kept on decaying maps and spotty index cards.48 But after Rosenthal sent his warning, nearly one quarter of the final tests were done at a stretch of road where a major part of the water main had been replaced some years earlier. When mains are updated, lead pipes, if they are there, are often removed, too.49 In Flint, these samples recorded very little lead.50 Finally, the rules require that homes tested in the first batch in 2014 be retested in the second round to make it easier to spot changes in the water quality. Yet only thirteen homes were retested—and all of these had scored low lead levels the first time around.51
Despite all that, Flint still exceeded the federal limit on lead, according to a report dated July 28. Even by the state’s own numbers, Wurfel’s claims on Michigan Radio didn’t hold up. The water wasn’t safe after all. The state would have to work with the city on a major notification campaign, advising residents on how to protect themselves.
But then the MDEQ did a curious thing. It supervised a revision of the results, with two of the seventy-one samples—both with extremely high lead—dropped from the calculation. One of them came from LeeAnne Walters’s home. Scrapping those tests brought the city’s lead level down to 11 ppb. That’s high, but within acceptable limits. When these revised results were made official, Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, added a handwritten note, “Two samples were removed from list for not meeting sample criteria.”52
LeeAnne Walters had been giving these public reports her close attention, and she noticed that her sample was excised. She wanted to know why. The MDEQ explained that she had a filter, which altered the water’s quality and invalidated the sample. (In fact, Walters had been told to remove the filter before the test, and she had done so.) The second sample was disqualified because it didn’t come from a single-family residence. Being stringent about the Lead and Copper Rule only when it lowered the lead count, while exploiting loopholes at every other turn, made the water seem perfectly compliant with the law.
As Flint endured an unseasonably hot summer, and media attention became sharper, Mayor Dayne Walling went on local television to calm the rising panic. He said that he and his family still drank the city water, and he encouraged others to do the same.53 He took a sip of it from a mug, live and on air, calmly telling the news anchor, “It’s your standard tap water.”
Meanwhile, the EPA’s Chicago office was fielding complaints about Del Toral’s report. Aggrieved staffers in the MDEQ protested that they had “obtained a copy from an outside [ACLU] website.” At least one of those complaints came from someone who had in fact been copied directly. The EPA’s repeated defense was that Del Toral’s report was the product of his own research; it hadn’t been reviewed or approved by the EPA. By releasing it outside the agency, he essentially acted outside his authority. The EPA did urge the MDEQ to tell Flint to get going with a corrosion control program (the state agency still disputed its necessity), but it had a generous timeline to implement it. So long, in fact, that Flint probably wouldn’t complete the program before it switched to lake water from the KWA.
By now, Miguel Del Toral was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t doing interviews, he wasn’t included on email threads about Flint, and he didn’t appear to join any interagency conference calls. When LeeAnne Walters went to Lansing with a group of organizers, she was told by the MDEQ that the report was flawed and that “Miguel had been handled.” There, it seemed, his work in Flint would end.54
“When I heard that, I grew quite concerned,” Marc Edwards recalled. “It wasn’t just smoke here, there was fire.”55
7
Meditations in an Emergency
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!/It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
—Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency” (1957)
I.
What do you do when a city is in a crisis? How do you fix a decades-old, slow-burn emergency? By the time of Flint’s water switch, the city’s problems were so deep-rooted and familiar that just about anyone in the state could have rattled them off (and so could people well beyond Michigan, thanks to storytellers such as native son Michael Moore). For local leaders like BB Nolden, the water issues seemed like one more thing on a long list of worries. Everything was urgent; in a strange way that made nothing urgent. This might explain the sluggish response of people who could have looked closer, sooner, at Flint’s water: public servants, journalists, environmental organizations, academics, medical professionals. But the water crisis was not just one more thing. Not only was the risk mortal, it was shaped from the start by the unusual political context of the city. Under emergency management, Flint didn’t have the power to make decisions for itself.
The story went back to 2011, Election Day, a downright balmy November afternoon. It reached 63 degrees in Flint at one point. Not bad at all for door knocking in the neighborhoods. Mayor Dayne Walling was running for his first full term in office, after having won a special midterm election two years earlier, and he was taking nothing for granted. He drove his dark silver 2006 Chevy Impala—GM-made, naturally—through town, going house by house and encouraging people to vote before the polls closed. Later, as was his tradition, he would end Election Day at his own polling location.
But plans changed when Walling’s cell phone rang. It was minutes before three in the afternoon. He had just parked the Impala outside Neithercut Elementary School on the city’s southwest side, and as he lumbered out of the car with the phone pressed against his ear, he found himself talking to Andy Dillon, Michigan’s state treasurer. It was a brief conversation. Dillon informed Walling that in two hours, just in time for the evening newscasts, the governor would announce that Flint was a fiscal disaster. The state was appointing an emergency manager to take charge. This was the ninth time that a Michigan city had come under emergency management.1 Flint now accounted for two of those nine times.
“I was just completely stunned that an emergency manager was being appointed without any substantial consultation with me about next steps,” Walling remembered. That the announcement came on Election Day “immediately led me to believe that a strange political calculus was behind that.”2
With about $25.7 million in accumulated deficits, Flint was designated by a unanimous state panel as being in a “local government financial emergency.”3 The questionable handling of Flint’s water and sewer funds got a special mention; in years past, money had been transferred out of them to fill cash shortages in the city’s general operations. To replace the depleted funds, water and sewer rates spiked under Mayor Walling. Three of the panel’s members had Flint connections: a former state senator who represented the area; a local businessman; and a onetime city administrator: Darnell Earley. Given the emergency designation, which Walling did not dispute, the panel had a choice of options to recommend. One was to reach a consent agreement for the state and city to tackle the difficulties cooperatively. Walling had expected this and was ready with a few proposals for such an agreement. But the panel claimed that local officials had not moved “with a degree of urgency and vigor commensurate with the seriousness of the existing financial emergency.”4 And so, five hours before the polls closed on the day that Flint reelected Dayne Walling with 56 percent of the vote, he learned that he was campaigning for an empty post, one that had been scrubbed of substance.
Walling’s shock that afternoon muted his memory of all that was said, which he regrets. But as far as he could recall, Andy Dillon gave him a phone number, saying he should use it if he needed to reach the Michigan State Police. “I couldn’t figure out if he thought there was a personal protection issue, or if people would start rioting,” Walling said.5 “Here I had, out of love for my city and motivation to tackle these difficult issues, moved home with my young family … and taken on personal and campaign debt, had finally won an election.… I probably knew more about government than a lot of state officials combined. I’m out busting my ass, walking the streets of Flint, asking people to support me to be mayor, and the governor’s going to sit back in his office, and … dial in an emergency manager who’s going to show up and become the mayor and the council. It was just so fundamentally wrong.”
Emergency management is supposed to be an extreme measure to meet extreme need. Eighteen states have a mechanism for the state to oversee local matters in distressed cities.6 In the 1970s, a state financial control board maneuvered New York City through its near-bankruptcy. New Jersey was the first to put a school district under its oversight (Jersey City, 1989), and it since did the same for the cities of Camden, Paterson, Trenton, Harrison, Asbury Park, Atlantic City, and Newark.7 Pennsylvania intervened in dozens of its struggling cities; Pittsburgh’s finances were under state control for about fourteen years, beginning in 2004.8 Congress created a mechanism for the fiscal oversight of Washington, D.C., and the person appointed to the job, Anthony Williams, was so successful and popular, he ended up being elected mayor in 1999. (Dayne Walling worked in Williams’s administration.) Connecticut created its bipartisan Municipal Accountability Review Board in 2017, whereby cities such as Hartford could apply for different levels of state involvement, which came with an infusion of funding to meet basic needs.9
In Michigan, the legislature first created a statute in 1988 to assign an “emergency financial manager” in Hamtramck, a small, diverse, independent town within Detroit’s borders. Two years later, the statute was expanded so that emergency managers could be deployed to any seriously troubled municipality or public school district. The policy was designed for cities and schools to escape bankruptcy, which destroys credit ratings, while tapping some of its advantages, such as the ability to restructure debt.10 The measure was used sparingly—only three cities were placed under emergency management over its first decade or so. But in 2002, it came to Flint for the first time. The governor appointed Ed Kurtz, a local resident and the president of Baker College, as the first emergency manager. (He’d show up again in the same role about a decade later.) Kurtz vowed to take no salary. The city then had 125,000 people, 8.3 percent unemployment, a deficit growing close to $30 million, and the dubious distinction of being the largest community in the state to get an intervention. Michigan’s treasurer at the time explained to the New York Times that Flint needed an emergency manager because it had failed to deal with the reality of its declining tax base. “Why do you have to have the state come in and tell you that you have a problem?” he told the reporter. “If we don’t act now, when do we act?”11
Kurtz’s authority was intermittent at first, as the City Council challenged the takeover in court. But by the end of the first year, he had implemented new code enforcement measures for buildings and homes, cut the pay for the mayor and council members, and eliminated the health, dental, and vision benefits for most city officials.12 (Two years later, he reinstated some of the pay.) Flint’s retirement board, facing Kurtz’s threat to replace its members, approved proposals to reduce contributions to the pension system. Kurtz temporarily shuttered recreation centers, closed the ombudsman’s office, and worked with the largest union to agree to a 4 percent pay cut. He also approved more than $1 million for sewer and road improvements and raised water bills by 11 percent. After almost two years, Kurtz recommended ending the emergency. But by then “there wasn’t much left,” Jim Ananich said. A schoolteacher and the son of a city ombudsman, the future state senator was elected to Flint’s council just after Kurtz left. “We’re rebuilding. The finances were in better shape, but there was nothing there.”
