The Poisoned City, page 25
41. Chicago’s almost unbelievably bold move to reverse the flow of the Chicago River meant that, instead of emptying into Lake Michigan, where it drew its drinking water, it turned the dirty current the other way, toward the basin of the Mississippi River and on to the Gulf of Mexico. In a U.S. Supreme Court case (Missouri v. Illinois & Sanitary District of Chicago, 180 U.S. 208 [1901]), the State of Missouri argued that Chicago had no right to send its pollution its way. But it lost, and to this day the river is reverse-engineered. Within the Great Lakes Compact, ratified in 2009 as a protocol for who gets to take water out of the lakes, and for what reasons, Chicago’s daily diversion from Lake Michigan is exempt. Dan Egan details some of the modern-day implications of this in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). See also Peter Annin, The Great Lakes Water Wars (Washington: Island Press, 2006), and Carl Smith’s City Water, City Life.
42. That would be the Detroit River. The whole Great Lakes system moves eastward, with Lake Superior and Lake Michigan flowing toward Lake Huron (linked, respectively, by the St. Mary’s River and the Straits of Mackinac). Water in Lake Huron then moves through the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, and the Detroit River before opening out into Lake Erie. Then there’s a steep drop—that’s Niagara Falls. After a stint in the Niagara River, the water reaches Lake Ontario. (The alternative route between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario: the Welland Canal, which bypasses the Falls.) From there, it flows through a chain of smaller lakes (Lake St. Lawrence, Lake St. Francis, and Lake St. Louis) before becoming the St. Lawrence River, and, finally, reaching the Atlantic Ocean. An enormous watershed replenishes the Great Lakes water system.
43. As the story goes, the fire started in the stable of a baker named John Harvey, when a worker, or perhaps Harvey himself, let the hot ash from his pipe drop into the dry hay. On this windy day, flames leaped beyond the livery. Detroiters streamed into the river for safety. They pulled their snuffling horses behind them and carried armfuls of possessions. There, with the cool water making their clothing heavy, they watched the inferno devour nearly every one of the city’s three hundred buildings. The memory of the fire inspired Detroit’s city motto: Speramus meliora; resurgent cineribus, or, “We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.” The Detroit Historical Society is a good resource on the fire. It’s also summarized in Michael Daisy, ed., Detroit Water and Sewage Department: The First 300 Years (Detroit: Detroit Water and Sewage Department, n.d.), http://dwsd.org/downloads_n/about_dwsd/history/complete_history.pdf.
44. This was in 1824. It was amended in 1873. Clarence Monroe Burton, William Stocking, and Gordon K. Miller, eds., The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922, vol.1 (Detroit: S. J. Clark, 1922), pp. 371–77; and “History of the Water Works of the City of Detroit” (Detroit: Raynor and Taylor, 1890), p. 3, compiled in Detroit (Mich.) Board of Water Commissioners, Act of Incorporation. Regulation. History.
45. Daisy, Detroit Water and Sewage Department, p. 4.
46. “History of the Water Works of the City of Detroit,” pp. 6–8.
47. Instead of a sewer system, St. Louis, where the American Water Works Association held its inaugural meeting, decided on the cheaper option of moving wastewater through a series of underground limestone caves. This led to at least one incredibly unfortunate flood.
48. “AWWA History,” American Water Works Association. In a video on this page (last accessed March 3, 2018), Jack Hoffbuhr, a former AWWA executive director, describes how lead pipes and drinking water were discussed at the first conference. He also gives a good overview of John Snow’s cholera breakthrough, https://www.awwa.org/about-us/history.aspx.
49. Gary Grant, The Water Sensitive City (West Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), p. 163; and Gregory L. Poe, The Evolution of Federal Water Pollution Control Policies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, 1995), p. 4.
50. The infamous fire happened on June 22, 1969, reported variously as having been ignited by a stray spark from a passing train or by molten slag from a steel mill. Time gave it big play a couple of months later, featuring dramatic photos of the Cuyahoga River engulfed in flames—photos that were actually taken during another fire on the same river in 1952. “Unfortunately, water pollution knows no political boundaries,” the magazine piece read. It indicted the way that rivers were treated as “convenient, free sewers.” “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism,” Time, August 1, 1969. See also Doron P. Levin, “River Not Yet Clean, but It’s Fireproof,” New York Times, June 25, 1989.
51. Another legislative victory of the environmental movement was the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, where the government for the first time attempted to articulate what hazardous waste is and how it should be handled. Rather than just addressing end-of-pipeline waste, as earlier laws did, it also made the reduction or elimination of waste one of its primary goals.
52. This was described in an article by James L. Agee, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water and hazardous materials, in an article in EPA Journal (March 1975, vol. 1, no. 3), titled “Protecting America’s Drinking Water: Our Responsibilities Under the Safe Drinking Water Act.” He wrote, “This may seem to be a restatement of the obvious, but it is a principle all too often violated by the Federal government. Paperwork cannot protect health—only action can.”
53. A little more on the Safe Drinking Water Act. It is the law that requires the EPA to develop and enforce drinking water standards. That includes the ability to set Maximum Contaminant Levels, or MCLs, for any substances that might be in drinking water that could harm public health. The early limit on lead was 50 parts per billion (ppb), and it applied only to water as it entered the distribution system, rather than at the tap (after its flow had come in contact with lead service lines, lead solder, and indoor plumbing). Eventually, the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule of 1991 set a lower limit for lead at the tap: 15 ppb. (However, the regulatory formula still allows up to 10 percent of samples in any given community to exceed 15 ppb before taking any action about it.) For implementation of this and other SDWA regulations, the EPA relies on state agencies, Native American tribes, and local water systems for monitoring and treatment. In Michigan, that meant the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had primacy—or primary enforcement responsibility—for making sure that the state’s public water systems met all the safety requirements, including lead limits. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Drinking Water Requirements for States and Public Water Systems: Primacy Enforcement Responsibility for Public Water Systems.” EPA.gov, n.d., https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/primacy-enforcement-responsibility-public-water-systems, last accessed March 2, 2016; Yanna Lambrinidou, Simoni Triantafyllidou, and Marc Edwards, “Failing Our Children: Lead in U.S. School Drinking Water,” New Solutions, vol. 20(1), 2010, pp. 25–47; Yanna Lambrinidou, written communication to the author, February 20, 2018.
54. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970,” https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/reorganization-plan-no-3-1970.html.
55. According to its archived website, this made the DWSD “the third largest provider of high-quality drinking water and wastewater treatment services in the United States.”
56. Flint’s first water system was founded in 1883, a private concern called the Flint Water Works Company, which delivered raw water from the Flint River to ratepayers. Twenty years later, the city purchased it for $262,500 and made it a public utility. In 1911, the plant began filtering water. As the city rapidly grew, about $12.5 million in capital improvements were put into the system between 1947 and 1955, which improved storage, treatment, and pumping. The Dort Highway plant that was rebooted in the twenty-first century was built in 1952. This is outlined in the Flint Water Advisory Task Force Final Report (March 2016), which in turn cites a brochure called “The Water Supply of Flint, Michigan,” which the city provided to the task force. For more on Flint’s drinking water history, including the information that follows on its water consumption, see S. W. Wiitala, K. E. Vanlier, and R. A. Krieger, Water Resources of the Flint Area, Michigan. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1499-E (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1963).
57. The corruption scandal in the 1960s and Flint’s decision-making process about its future with drinking water were chronicled by the robust newspapers, especially the Detroit Free Press and, published by Freep reporters during a strike, the Detroit Daily Press. Among them: “2 City Officials Ousted at Flint,” Detroit Free Press, February 8, 1964, p. 21; “$39 Million Water Bond Sale OK’d,” Detroit Daily Press, October 7, 1967, sec. B, p. 4; Hal Cohen, “Water Sale to Stall City’s Fluoridation,” Detroit Free Press, January 25, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; Harry Golden Jr., “City No Trickster in Fluoride Fight,” Detroit Free Press, January 10, 1965, sec. C, p. 3; “Huge Waterway for Michigan Studied,” Detroit Free Press, October 10, 1967, sec. A, p. 8; “Indicted in Flint Scandal: Pontiac City Manager Quits,” Detroit Free Press, February 12, 1964, sec. A, p. 1; George Jaksa, “3 Officials in Flint Cleared,” Detroit Free Press, February 24, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; George Jaksa, “Flint Votes for Detroit Water Deal,” Detroit Free Press, April 23, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; “Lake Huron Water Plant Deal OK’d,” Detroit Free Press, July 6, 1962, sec. A, p. 3; Eric Pianin, “Suburb Raises an Uproar over Water Rate Hike,” Detroit Daily Press, December 26, 1967, p. 5; “Pipe Job to Start for Huron Water,” Detroit Free Press, January 29, 1964, sec. A, p. 1; “Pontiac Manager Indicted in Fraud,” Detroit Free Press, July 29, 1965, sec. A, p. 3; “Two Face Conspiracy Charges,” Detroit Free Press, November 27, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; “Water Officials to Confer Here,” Detroit Daily Press, September 3, 1964, p. 13. For more contemporary sources on this debacle: “The Flint Water Crisis: Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Flint,” Report of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, February 17, 2017, pp. 52–54, https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/VFlintCrisisRep-F-Edited3-13-17_554317_7.pdf; Ron Fonger, “50 Years Later: Ghosts of Corruption Still Linger Along Old Path of Failed Flint Water Pipeline,” MLive—Flint Journal, November 12, 2012.
58. Andrew R. Highsmith discusses this in-depth in Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), especially in chap. 5.
59. “New Huron Water Line Is Hailed,” Detroit Free Press, December 15, 1967, p. 3; and “2nd Step of Huron Water Project Near Finish,” Detroit Free Press, December 12, 1967, p. 2. The Detroit water system grew into one of the largest public utilities in the nation. Its headquarters suggested the sort of majesty with which the city approached water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the people were invited to be part of it. The water department was situated on a 110-acre riverfront park on the east side. It featured a manmade canal with two islands, two greenhouses, and a 185-foot minaret tower that offered spectacular views of the city to those who braved its winding staircase. There was also a hobby center for woodcrafts, a mooring basin for seaplanes, playgrounds, rowboats, a baseball diamond, groves of chestnut and pear trees, a children’s wading pool, and a popular floral clock made of more than seven thousand plants that was powered by paddlewheels. The first branch of the Detroit Public Library opened there, staffed, somewhat awkwardly, by employees of the water department. To this day, a massive Beaux-Arts gateway monument marks the entry onto the campus, built to honor the longtime president of the Board of Water Commissioners who left nearly all of his estate for the maintenance of the grounds. But in 1945 the minaret tower, deemed too expensive to maintain, was demolished. Six years later, the whole park was shut down. Public outcry compelled the city to reopen a bit of it, but the effort was halfhearted and short-lived. Water Works Park has been closed for more than fifty years. The locked gateway is the only sign that it once existed.
CHAPTER 2: CORROSION
1. Blake Thorne, “Even the Trees Had a Bad Time in the Flint-Area This Winter,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 6, 2014.
2. Nicole Weddington, “Friends of the Flint River Trail Kick Off Weekly Sunday Bike Rides,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 6, 2014.
3. Adrian Hedden, “Fixing Flint: Revitalizing Flint Lake Park Brings North Side Residents Together,” MLive—Flint Journal, July 17, 2014.
4. William E. Ketchum III, “Flint Nonprofit Brings Flint Symphony String Performance to MTA Bus Terminal,” MLive—Flint Journal, July 16, 2014, updated July 17, 2014.
5. Ron Fonger, “State Says Flint River Water Meets All Standards but More Than Twice the Hardness of Lake Water,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 23, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
6. Crooks sent the email on May 15, 2014, to three of her colleagues. She notes that Lathan Jefferson spoke with her and with another EPA expert.
7. Ahmad Bajjey, “Flint Residents Avoiding the Tap, Drinking Bottled Water Instead,” WEYI-TV NBC25, June 2, 2014, news, video, and article available online, http://nbc25news.com/news/local/flint-residents-avoiding-the-tap-drinking-bottled-water-instead, last accessed March 3, 2018.
8. The final report of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force sums this up: “In advance of the City of Flint’s conversion from DWSD water supply to use of Flint River water, MDEQ had multiple communications and meetings with Flint Utilities Department staff and their consultants. A plan of treatment of Flint River water was discussed and covered numerous issues including dosing of chemicals, use of polymers, and unit process performance. When asked by Flint water plant personnel about adding phosphate in the treatment process, as DWSD does for corrosion control, MDEQ said that a corrosion control treatment decision would be made after two 6-month monitoring periods were conducted to see if corrosion control treatment was needed.” Flint Water Advisory Task Force, Final Report, March 2016, p. 27. Also, on June 17, 2014, Adam Rosenthal of the MDEQ emailed Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, and confirmed to him that no monitoring for orthophosphates was needed because no orthophosphates were being added to the water (p. 90).
9. The corrosion control requirements come from the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule, and it applies to all community water systems that serve at least fifty thousand people. As early as the 1950s, when Flint still treated its own river water, it was using “polyphosphate … to lessen the corrosion of water pipe when in contact with the cold water” (“The Water Supply of Flint, Michigan,” city brochure, p. 11, as quoted in the final report of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force). Corrosion control ceased in Flint after the April 2014 switch. The MDEQ argued that this was appropriate. According to its interpretation of the rules, it could do two six-month evaluations on the river water before deciding whether to use corrosion control at all, and, if so, what kind was best. For more on corrosion treatment technology: John R. Scully, “The Corrosion Crisis in Flint, Michigan: A Call for Improvements in Technology,” Bridge 46, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 16–29. For the note about half of water systems using orthophosphates: Siddhartha Roy, “Test Update: Flint River Water 19x More Corrosive Than Detroit Water for Lead Solder; Now What?,” FlintWaterStudy.org, September 11, 2015.
10. Keith Harrison, “Flint Water, Corrosivity, and Lead,” TapTalk, Delaware Health and Public Services, Division of Public Health, Office of Drinking Water, Spring 2016.
11. “Chlorides,” Bureau of Water, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, n.d., https://www.scdhec.gov/HomeAndEnvironment/Docs/Chlorides.pdf.
12. Gwen Pearson, “Road Salt Is Polluting Our Rivers,” Wired, March 12, 2015.
13. Walter R. Kelly, Samuel V. Panno, and Keith Hackley, “The Sources, Distribution, and Trends of Chloride in the Waters of Illinois,” Bulletin B-74, Illinois State Water Survey, Prairie Research Institute. Champaign: University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, March 2012, http://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/B/ISWSB-74.pdf; and Mary Hunt, Elizabeth Herron, and Linda Green, “Chlorides in Fresh Water,” College of the Environment and Life Sciences, University of Rhode Island, March 2012, http://cels.uri.edu/docslink/ww/water-quality-factsheets/Chlorides.pdf.
14. “Half of the chlorides came from using ferric chloride instead of ferric sulfate coagulant … added during water treatment,” Marc Edwards, email message to the author, February 23, 2017.
15. Ron Fonger, “City Adding More Lime to Flint River Water as Resident Complaints Pour In,” MLive—Flint Journal, June 12, 2014.
16. For the $140 and $35 numbers: Dominic Adams, “Flint Monthly Water and Sewer Bills Highest in Genesee County by $35,” MLive—Flint Journal, June 1, 2014, updated June 27, 2014; Ann Espinola, “Water Rates Revealed for Small, Medium, Large Utilities,” American Water Works Association, Connections, March 27, 2017. The latter describes the findings from the AWWA’s 2016 Waste and Wastewater Rate Survey. “Median water bills at medium-sized utilities were just $31.09 per month for 7,480 gallons of water, but soared to $46.61 for wastewater services and fees,” Espinola writes. “And among the four regions of the United States, the West had the highest water rates, while the South had the lowest. Customers in the Northeast shelled out the most for wastewater services, while those in the Midwest paid the least.” Specifically, the median monthly water rate in the Midwest was $32.48, and wastewater charges were “coming in at less than $40.” So together that’s less than $72.48, compared to Flint’s bills of $140 per month.
