The Poisoned City, page 21
The investigative team wasn’t done yet. In June 2017, it raised eyebrows by charging two of the state’s most senior health officials. Nick Lyon, the director of MDHHS and a member of the governor’s cabinet, was accused of involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office for “taking steps to suppress information illustrating obvious and apparent harms,” allegedly allowing a public health crisis to continue. Dr. Eden Wells, the agency’s top medical executive, was accused of misconduct, obstruction of justice, providing false testimony, and threatening to withhold funding from a Flint group investigating the Legionnaires’ outbreak.32 Later, she too faced an involuntary manslaughter charge. Snyder defended them both, saying they had been “instrumental in Flint’s recovery.” They had his “full faith and confidence.” Though others had been suspended without pay after they were charged, these two would remain on the payroll, managing programs that dealt with the Flint health crisis.33 An MDHHS brochure floating around Flint—“Health Coverage for People Impacted by Flint Water”—was stamped with Rick Snyder’s and Nick Lyon’s names, though they were both short on credibility in the city.
Though they failed to attract as much attention as the dramatic criminal charges, two civil lawsuits were filed against the consultants who advised the city on the water switch, Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam (LAN) and the Veolia consulting firm, alleging professional misbehavior that worsened and prolonged the crisis.34 The attorney general’s team sought “to recover monetary damages … in the hundreds of millions of dollars” from the companies and to put that money into a special fund managed by the Flint community for its own needs.35
And yet there was still move to come. In March 2018, as preliminary examinations were underway for those facing charges, the lead prosecutor said that a “spin-off” criminal investigation was already in process. He told a legislative committee that “we believe there was a significant financial fraud that drove this.” It was too simple to suggest that Flint’s water switch was motivated solely by the desire to save money. Rather, the investigator emphasized, “I believe greed drove this.” And while he didn’t specify who was being targeted for possible charges, he added that prosecutors were “moving at lightning speed.”36
Altogether, the avalanche of lawsuits came with a staggering array of hearings, paperwork, testimonies, and legal fees. It was chaotic, time-consuming, and expensive. For those hoping to see the governor accept direct responsibility—if anyone had had the authority to demand a serious intervention in Flint, it was him—the proceedings were unsatisfying.37 But the legal battles were an opportunity to carve out a place for environmental justice in the law where it had not fully existed before—to acknowledge that Flint, the grande traverse of the river, was as deserving of truth and reconciliation as any other place. It was, maybe, a start.
12
Genesis
We should be allowed to destroy only what we ourselves can re-create. We cannot re-create this world. We cannot re-create “wilderness.” We cannot even, truly, re-create ourselves. Only our behavior can we re-create, or create anew.
—Alice Walker, “Everything Is a Human Being,” Living by the Word (1989)
I.
The Flint River shone, as bright as if it were its own source of light. Trees tilted toward their own reflections, their leaves thick with shades of green that can be found only in late August. Just off the riverbank, a few miles outside of downtown Flint, about thirty people gathered. Kathleen Gazall was one of them, the architect and city booster. So was Congressman Dan Kildee and Steve Carmody, the Michigan Radio reporter. It was an eclectic group brought together by the Flint River Watershed Coalition for one of its summer paddles.1 That afternoon in 2016, the group rubbed sunscreen into their skin, tugged down the brims of their hats, climbed into plastic kayaks, and, for the next few hours, rowed through the water toward Vietnam Veterans Park. The river was calm and wide, curving around woodlands and meadows, under bridges, and through city neighborhoods. For a while, the white spider-legged water tower at the treatment plant stood before them, straight ahead, like a steeple, or a setting sun.
The problem is not the river. That was the message of the watershed coalition. The drinking water wasn’t dangerous because the river itself was poisonous, as so many assumed, remembering the long shadow of the polluting past. The waterway was in fact becoming healthier all the time, with the advent of environmental laws, the decline of industry, and the day-to-day work of river recovery groups. In the years leading up to the water crisis, nearly four hundred species of birds, reptiles, and fish (some even safe to eat) had been spotted in the Flint River and its tributaries. Even bald eagles had returned.2 The river’s mouth was in the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, a haven for tens of thousands of migratory birds. From there it joined a chain of waterways that flowed out toward the Saginaw Bay and on to the Great Lakes.3
The coalition had supported the temporary switch to the river “as an opportunity for education about a fabulous resource,” said Rebecca Fedewa, the red-headed director.4 “‘Look, now you’re drinking it!’” Had the move been handled well, “it could have been tremendous.” But it wasn’t. It had brought devastation. One consequence among many was that it perpetuated myths about the river. Fedewa’s heart sank when she saw phrases like “the toxic Flint River” show up in news articles and even in the presidential debate held in Flint.5 She and other volunteers used every tool they had, from an enormous amount of data to social media (#itsnottheriver) to break through the noise. The results were mixed.
The small nonprofit, which relied on volunteers for river cleanup and water monitoring, had big ambitions. Its activities covered all seven counties that touch the river. Its chapters worked on cultivating the Flint River Trail, the downtown river corridor, and the watery stretch that runs through Lapeer County. Through summer paddles and floats, the group sought to end people’s alienation from the river. To the coalition, it was an overlooked wonder in an area that was hungry for beauty. And there was something else: all the communities in the 1,400-square-mile watershed—the city, the suburbs, the outlying rural towns and farms—had a common stake in the river’s health. It was an opening for a divided region to come together, for people to see themselves as connected through the ecological fact of the land they lived upon. If they took better care of their river, perhaps they would take better care of each other, too.
With the crisis, the watershed coalition feared that its support would plummet and the community’s estrangement from the river would only deepen. So it was shocking when the opposite happened. Attendance at the coalition’s 2016 annual meeting broke the all-time record.6 Between thirty and forty people came to each canoeing and kayaking event that year, double the usual number. The cataclysm had made people curious about the river. They wanted to see for themselves.
II.
It took more than two years of squabbling and legal battles, but at the end of 2017 Flint decided to stick with the Detroit water department, forgoing the Karegnondi Water Authority entirely.7 The city was still responsible for the $7 million annual payment for the KWA bonds, but in exchange for signing a thirty-year contract, the Detroit utility—now restructured as the Great Lakes Water Authority, or GLWA—agreed to credit that sum to Flint’s account. The Detroit system would receive the rights to nearly all of what would have been Flint’s share of raw water from the KWA. The deal, approved by Flint’s council, included funds for relieving high water bills and a promise by the governor to put a city representative on the GLWA board. Governor Snyder also tried to persuade the General Motors engine plant on West Bristol Road to return to Flint’s water supply, delivering a letter requesting as much in January 2018. But a GM representative said there were no plans to make the change.8 Other Genesee County communities that had contracted with the KWA began their water switch in November 2017, with the help of an all-new $72 million treatment facility. KWA got its financing in the end, with or without Flint. “Our treatment goal is to match the water quality of the [Detroit] system,” said one of the engineers.
There was still long, hard work to be done rebuilding Flint’s water infrastructure, including the full replacement of thousands of lead service lines. With insufficient funding, this started as an excruciatingly dragged-out process, including pilot projects, pricey contractor bids, and best guesses about where the pipes were actually located.9 For those on the ground, it was maddening. “We need a clear, concise plan of action to replace the pipes so we don’t have to live out of a bottle of water when we’re surrounded by the Great Lakes of Michigan,” declared Yvonne Lewis, one of the community leaders.
So the legal settlement that would replace Flint’s service lines was a breakthrough. It was supplemented by an additional $100 million that came through from the federal government, which included a law change that allowed Michigan to forgive the $20 million that Flint owed in water loans, dating back to 1999. This meant that the city would be able to undertake the wholesale replacement of its pipes, both lead and galvanized steel. It was an almost unprecedented public works project. To date, Madison, Wisconsin, and Lansing, Michigan, were believed to be the only major cities that had fully removed their aging lead-based service lines.
But cities around the country now felt unable to take their pipes for granted. Flint’s story was a wake-up call. A 2016 investigation by the National Resources Defense Council found that fifty-three hundred water systems were in violation of federal lead rules.10
Rural America was vulnerable, too, especially because small utilities, serving a few thousand people or fewer, are given a pass on lead regulations. (They don’t have to treat the water to prevent contamination until lead is discovered, and even then, they’re rarely compelled to remove it.11) Flint helped others to realize the stakes of their public water systems, inspiring communities to examine them with an urgency that had not been seen since the grand old days when they were built. For these modern-day alchemists, though, the trick isn’t to turn lead into gold; it’s to make it disappear.
Over in Lansing, city hall was inundated by calls from people who wanted to know how it had worked this magic. Lansing’s story showed how it could be done. The city, which draws its water from the Saginaw Aquifer, four hundred feet below the surface, had carried out a full pipe replacement program. The overhaul was not prompted by a public health emergency or court order, and it was so efficient and cost-effective residents barely noticed it. “When we show up at homes to replace the lead service lines, people think there’s a problem with the water,” said Steve Serkaian of Lansing’s Board of Water and Light.12 The notion that there was no problem—that the work was preemptive infrastructure improvement—was so unusual that it came as a surprise.
The project began when Virg Bernero, then a Michigan state senator, learned about the lead-in-water crisis in Washington, D.C., in 2004. He and his staff began asking questions of the city’s Board of Water and Light and state agencies. They also contacted Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech. While Lansing had an effective anticorrosion program, and the city’s lead tests appeared fine, “we didn’t have confidence in the results,” Bernero said. By then, he’d learned enough about the loopholes in the Lead and Copper Rule. Given that no amount of lead exposure is safe, his team wanted to err on the side of caution.
Bernero formed a safe drinking water task force that included professors from Michigan State and other experts who “did not have a vested interest in the system such as it was.” Together, they put the system under the microscope. They met with a great deal of defensiveness at first, but in 2004 the BWL’s commissioners accepted the task force’s recommendation to replace all the lead service lines. It got to work on a methodical ten-year, $42 million plan to replace every one of Lansing’s fourteen thousand pipes. (Bernero had the opportunity to oversee it; he was elected mayor in 2006.) The plan went slightly over schedule—the city was hit by the recession and state revenue-sharing cuts, just as Flint was—but by the end of 2016 they were done.
The money for the project came the old-fashioned way—Lansing “just raised the rates,” Bernero explained, referring to water bills. One unusual advantage: unlike Flint’s system, the 130-year-old BWL is a wholly owned city subsidiary, which simplified its ability to build the cost of new infrastructure into its rates.13 Also, while Lansing has a lot in common with Flint—it’s another GM legacy town, one that built Oldsmobiles, and it has roughly the same size population—it was not nearly as challenged by vacancy. It had powerful anchor institutions that sustained it over the years, as the home of the state government and with Michigan State’s campus based just two miles away in East Lansing.
Also, because BWL owns the entire water system, it could replace all parts of the infrastructure without involving homeowners. In other communities, the customer may own some portion of the line leading to their property; if a utility wants to replace it, some of the cost is put on the customer’s tab.14 Many anti-lead advocates claim that utilities should be responsible for the whole replacement: the homeowner didn’t put the lead line in the ground, and in fact it was often legally required to have it there. Homeowners have no meaningful control over the part that is considered their property.
Lansing’s other trick was to design a graceful method for execution that cut the cost and time of pipe replacement in half. After two years of digging trenches, and with the prospect of disrupting untold square miles of streets, sidewalks, and yards, Lansing decided to rethink the way its workers were laying the new lines. Experimentation yielded an innovative technique. All workers had to do was cut two squares in the ground at either end of the line. One exposed the water main and service connection at the curb, and the other exposed the service box. Then, using a special tool invented by engineers in the city’s own machine shop, it took just one elegant motion to thread the old lead pipe out and the new copper pipe in.
“We submit notifications [to residents] to explain what’s happening,” Serkaian said, “because we need permission to enter their basement and disconnect the lead service line to the meter, and hook the meter up to the new copper line. There’s a minor inconvenience for an hour or so in not having water service.” Occasionally, the city also had to issue traffic advisories; vehicles were diverted when crews were working on major streets. But that was it.
Lansing also minimized disruption by mapping out its pipe replacement to follow the construction of another infrastructure improvement: updating its sewage system to better deal with flooding. The sheer scale of the pipe project also had accelerated efficiency built into it. Work crews had done it so many times, they only became faster and more adept. “They’ve learned how to overcome any and all obstacles,” Serkaian said.
It was a promising picture of how to make cities work better. And it cut against the broader pattern. When the 21st Century Infrastructure Commission that Governor Snyder had called for released its report, it laid out how Michigan’s spending on infrastructure is near the bottom nationally. Between 2002 and 2013, it saw the third-largest decline in that allocation as a portion of its GDP.15 This happened even though infrastructure spending brings an almost immediate economic boost. Every dollar that goes into water and sewer projects returns $2.03 in revenue.16 And the benefits for the environment and public health are obvious: for example, the opportunity to stop the 5.7 billion gallons of untreated sewage that had flowed into Michigan waterways since 2008.
Nationwide, states and municipalities have slashed infrastructure spending by about 55 percent since 2003, while federal spending has dropped by almost 19 percent. Infrastructure investment plummeted from a high of 3 percent of the nation’s GDP in the late 1960s to less than 2 percent in 2014.17 It happened at a time that roughly correlates with the abandonment of America’s core cities in favor of sprawling metropolitan regions. Shaken by the Flint water crisis, Congress passed a federal aid package that President Obama signed in the last weeks of his administration that included $20 million in loans for water infrastructure improvements around the country.
Mayor Bernero is sympathetic to competing priorities in local government. But that’s exactly why he felt cities should find out where they stand with their water systems. “We’ve got pipes in the ground in many cities that are close to one hundred years old, aging, underground and easy to ignore,” he said. They have to be replaced eventually anyway—lead ones all the more so—and while it might seem that “no news is good news” when it comes to pipes, any slight change in water chemistry can pose a devastating threat, as it did in Flint and Washington, D.C.
