The Poisoned City, page 3
III.
Call them inland seas. Carved out at the end of the last glacial period, more than ten thousand years ago, and filled first with the meltwater of retreating sheets of ice, the Great Lakes hold about one fifth of the world’s surface freshwater.34 Spill it across the United States, and it will settle over the forty-eight conterminous states at an even depth of ten feet. At ninety-four thousand square miles, their surface area is about equal to that of the United Kingdom, and their drainage basin covers two hundred thousand square miles, almost the size of France.35 On a map, that basin stretches across ten degrees of latitude and eighteen degrees of longitude. The water is in constant motion, powered by rolling waves and rip currents, an engine strong enough to modulate the climate. If you stand on the moon, you can pick out their telltale shock of deep blue.
Michigan lies like a handprint in the water. An assertion of the human self in the wild sea: I am here. Its two curving peninsulas are shaped by where the waves of four of the five interconnected lakes crash. Michigan’s thirty-two hundred miles of coastline, more than for any other state except Alaska, turn from soft-blowing sand dunes into craggy beaches into the brilliantly colored cliffs and turrets of the Pictured Rocks, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set his famous poem about Hiawatha: By the shores of Gitche Gumee / By the shining Big-Sea-Water. Tens of thousands of tree-riddled islands are scattered over the Great Lakes. One of them is Isle Royale, the only national park that is an island, and reachable only by seaplane or a three-and-a-half-hour ferry ride. Moose roam among fat balsam firs, skinny aspens, mountain ash, and red maple trees. At dusk, loons sing their mournful call.
The seas were first crisscrossed by Mackinaw boats and bark canoes; then square-sailed brigs and three-masted schooners; and then lake freighters and passenger steamers that left a black flag of smoke unfurling behind them. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a letter from a steamboat off the southern shore of Lake Erie. “This lake without sails,” he wrote, “this shore which does not yet show any trace of the passage of man, this eternal forest which borders it; all that, I assure you, is not grand in poetry only; it’s the most extraordinary spectacle that I have seen in my life.”36
Standing as totems to how the water can be cruel, more than 120 lighthouses ring the coasts, shimmering like stars in the night.37 But they are not always enough. Lake Superior especially, the largest freshwater lake in the world, holds the wreckage of hundreds of ships, and those who sailed them, in its thousand-foot depths. Tales of ghost ships have been whispered, sailor to sailor, since at least 1679.38 The Ojibwa people—they lived not only on the shores of the Flint River but also far across the North Country—told stories about a spiny underwater monster called the mishipeshu. It conjured storms over the lakes, putting those who traveled on them in mortal danger. With its thrashing tail, it spun calm water into rapids and whirlpools; it broke the winter ice beneath your feet as if the cold, slick glass were as soft as butter. The monster might be appeased with a pinch of tobacco if you offered it at the start of your journey. It might be. Three or four hundred years ago, an artist traced the lynx-like shape of the mishipeshu in red ocher on a white crystalline cliff on Lake Superior’s northern shore. You can still see its horned silhouette today in an Ontario provincial park, among thirty-some more ordinary shapes of life in this corner of the world: a heron, an eagle, a beaver, a man on a horse. Mishipeshu stands in profile with its head cocked, as if watching those who, in their innocence, push off the rock and into the waves.
Inland in Michigan, you are never more than six miles away from a natural source of water. More than eleven thousand lakes are scattered around the state, many with wooden docks jutting into them from white-sand or stony beaches, beloved by tourists who make summer pilgrimages from cities on the lower latitudes: Lansing, Kalamazoo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. Around the state, a web of slow, dark rivers and streams, thirty-six thousand miles of them, spider from one lake to another, and then out toward the inland seas.
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Flint was still something of a frontier town, but it was flush from the lust for lumber. Michigan white pines were sold as far as San Francisco and Shanghai, and Flint was an excellent hub for them.39 Trees were cut in the woods, floated in on the Flint River during the spring thaw, sliced into boards in the sawmills, and then shipped around the world. With its growing population, Flint finally got around to incorporating as a city in 1855.
As Flint matured, so did other cities around the country. The Industrial Revolution sparked tremendous urban growth, while westward expansion led to ambitious development in new landscapes. One of the biggest challenges: figuring out how to get water to people. Easy access to water was a necessity for health, sanitation, fire prevention, and economic growth—that much was obvious. But working out how to provide it turned into a big, unruly experiment in shaping cities as places that serve the public good. Each community tried out different techniques, tailoring the design to its unique geography and expertise. Some pulled from surface water, others from groundwater, and still others combined the two. Philadelphia, one of the earliest innovators, got serious about building a water system after an epidemic of yellow fever killed about 10 percent of its population. The city installed miles of iron pipes, and, after a disappointing experiment in moving water with steam power, it upgraded to waterwheels. New York City built an expensive aqueduct from a reservoir in Westchester County in 1842, becoming one of the first in the country to use water from outside its own borders. Today the city draws from three lakes and nineteen reservoirs to move more than 1 billion gallons of water each day, and its crystal-clear quality is among the best in the country.40 Boston cast around for decades, commissioning reports and holding referenda but failing to take any meaningful action toward building a central waterworks. Frustration intensified during the “underground wars” between neighbors, when one would dig a new well that drained the well of the person next door. In 1838, Bostonians petitioned the City Council: “Let the thing be done, and done as soon as by any exertion consistent with prudence and reasonable economy is practicable.” Eight years later, the city finally broke ground on an aqueduct that drew water from Long Pond, about seventeen miles west. Thanks to gravity, water easily flowed down to the city.
As for the Great Lakes region, Chicago first had a private waterworks that served only a small portion of the city, but it didn’t work well. Live fish kept showing up in customers’ buckets. The city absorbed the company in 1851 and expanded its draw of freshwater from Lake Michigan. But supply was limited. Unless there was a fire, no public water was available on Sundays. Industry dumped so much waste into the Chicago River—chemicals and carcasses—that it contaminated the water that was pulled from the lakeshore, near where the river emptied. It made people sick. But of all the ideas bandied about as to how to make the water safer, nobody seriously entertained the idea of stopping the pollution. Instead, the city outpaced the disgusting effluent by building a two-mile tunnel through the bed of Lake Michigan to reach clearer waters. It then went further by building a canal that reversed the Chicago River, so that rather than emptying into the lake, the water (and pollution) flowed west, ending up in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Both were outstanding feats of engineering, transformative for the health of the rising city, and, while the river reversal is controversial to this day, the water system became a symbol of Chicago’s indefatigable spirit.41 A few years after the tunnel opened, the Great Chicago Fire ripped through the city. One of the few buildings in its path that survived was the Gothic water tower.
In Detroit, about seventy miles from Flint, early residents dipped buckets in the river that is part of the Great Lakes chain.42 To stave off fire in the wooden outpost, locals were required by law to keep a cask of water on hand. The fort later developed a delivery system by horse-drawn carriage. But in 1805 stray ash from a pipe ignited a fire that swallowed Detroit’s tinderbox structures as if they were nothing more than air.43 Bucket brigades and the city’s single fire engine attacked it, but it was no use. About six hours after the fire started, the only structures still standing were a stone warehouse, a little fort high on a hill, and a maze of blackened chimneys that, separated from their homes, now looked like aged tombstones.
The trauma led to the creation of a more sophisticated water system, one that, many years later, would play a large role in the fate of Flint. After an experiment with public wells failed, a wharf and pump were built near the river “at which all persons who may reside within the city of Detroit, shall be at all times … entitled to take and draw water for their use and convenience,” according to the authorizing legislation.44 In exchange, residents paid an annual tax of one dollar. They later paid a flat rate of ten dollars a year (commercial customers paid more) for water that ran through the city’s first pipelines: tamarack trees, which were rafted down waterways to Detroit, hollowed out, laid end to end, and joined by sleeves made of lead.45 Contemporary work crews still sometimes stumble upon wooden lines like these when they dig in the ground, and they find them to be in perfect shape.
As in other cities, the young waterworks in Detroit experimented with different technologies for delivery and treatment, but the company lost money while “being continually assailed with complaints of the inadequateness of the supply and the impurity of the water,” according to one history. The early administrators were found to have violated their charter to provide the city with safe water. In exclamatory fashion, an investigative committee recommended that the City Council “appoint some person [to lead a new waterworks] that will spend his time EXCLUSIVELY for the INTERESTS of the city.”46 They did so. But the new leadership had many of the same problems. Supply was so inconsistent that in some parts of Detroit, residents could draw water only at night.
For all the challenges, expectations for the right to quality water were rising. A turning point had come in 1854, when a thick-browed English doctor named John Snow made a huge discovery. The world was convulsing through the deadliest year of another cholera pandemic—the third in less than four decades, killing millions of people. Great Britain alone lost twenty-three thousand people the year that Snow used pioneering public health techniques to show that cholera spread through contaminated water. He was even able to pinpoint the specific water pump on Broad Street that was the source of the outbreak in London. Snow pled with local authorities to disable the pump, and when they did the plague ended. Despite this, it took years before Snow’s work won widespread acceptance. It contradicted the prevailing theory that cholera spread through miasma, or “bad air.” But Snow was eventually proved correct, as was the emerging germ theory—the notion that many diseases are spread by microscopic germs, often waterborne ones.
What this meant was that disease was best averted when all citizens were served by fully equipped waterworks and sewers. Providing service to just the wealthy few, as Chicago first tried, didn’t work. Cities sped up their work to deliver quality water to residents, not only by building pipes and pumps, but also by disinfecting it with chlorine and filtering it with sand and gravel. The improvements in health and mortality rates, especially among populations who lived in dense urban centers, were profound.
Making the delivery of clean, treated water a basic civic service took another step forward when, in 1881, twenty-two men from six states gathered in St. Louis, a city that had lost at least 6 percent of its population in a cholera outbreak a few decades earlier, when it had no sewer system.47 The men formed the American Water Works Association with an aim to professionalize water service, exchanging information that would spare cities from having to repeat the costly mistakes that had hindered others.48 In a foreboding note for twenty-first-century Flint, one of the discussion topics at the first AWWA conference was about the poisonous effect of lead pipes on drinking water.
Participation in the AWWA was voluntary, however. For all the hustle and innovation that went into connecting people to collective water systems, there were no enforceable national standards for safety. Until well into the twentieth century, the federal government’s environmental programs focused on conservation—things such as the forest service, the national parks service, and the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. Pollution and public health weren’t really on Washington’s radar. Local and state governments were left to make their own rules.
After more than a hundred attempts over fifty years, Congress passed the first major law addressing water quality in 1948. The Water Pollution Control Act was spurred by growing concern over the 2.5 billion tons of raw sewage that was being dumped into America’s waterways every single day.49 The law’s intentions were good—to reduce pollution in interstate waters—but as policy it was weak, too stripped down in its final form to improve the condition of water that, like the carcass-strewn Chicago River, bore the indignities of industry, agriculture, and human sewage.
The biggest advance didn’t come until the early 1970s, when the environmental movement triumphed with a number of new laws. Foremost among them were the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Three years after an errant spark set the chemical-slick Cuyahoga River in Ohio on fire—not for the first time, but never before featured so vividly in Time magazine—the Clean Water Act dramatically expanded earlier legislation to limit the toxic waste that was unloaded into America’s rivers, streams, and lakes.50 Passed by Congress over President Richard Nixon’s veto, it set the norm so that no industry had an automatic right to pollute the water. At about the same time, the Clean Air Act was greatly strengthened, which made for not only clearer skies but also clearer waters, since airborne pollution eventually settles on the waterways. The new Clean Air Act also affirmed the principle that the environment should be treated as a public trust, and, accordingly, it empowered people to file citizen suits to protect it.51
Then there was the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. It was designed so that there would be a national baseline for tap water. The old way of allowing states to set their own standards broke down after a number of highly publicized emergencies: cancer-causing chemicals found in the water supplies of New Orleans and Pittsburgh; bacterial contamination detected in rural communities with older systems; lead leaching into the water that passed through pipes in Boston.52 The Safe Drinking Water Act laid out minimum quality standards and developed assistance programs to help drinking water systems meet them. Significantly, as the people of Flint would come to know well, it depended upon utilities to self-monitor and self-report.53
Ultimate responsibility for these new laws belonged to the brand-new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which President Nixon created with an executive order in 1970.54 In the decades since, the spectacular recovery of waterways all over the country, including the Great Lakes and the Cuyahoga, Chicago, and Flint Rivers, has proved its worth.
In Michigan, the sprawling Detroit Water and Sewerage Department became the largest supplier of drinking water. It served about four million citizens, or nearly 40 percent of the state’s population.55 DWSD customers lived not only in Detroit, but also in the suburbs, exurbs, and outlying rural towns. In fact, suburban growth was largely made possible because new towns were able to hook onto the Detroit system, providing them with essential infrastructure before they had the resources to build their own.
Flint’s consumption of Detroit water began with a deal made in the spring of 1964. At the time, nearly two hundred thousand residents, and about a thousand people outside the city limits, were connected to the city’s own water system, which used the Flint River.56 It withdrew about 36 million gallons from the river every day, and not just to provide residents with something to drink: about 60 percent of the total was absorbed by Flint’s mighty industrial plants, which were then at their roaring peak.
It seemed that Flint’s water needs would only grow. Civic leaders worried about whether the river could support the population and industries for decades into the future. Or would its limited capacity stunt development? For years, there were passionate debates about what to do, and it came down to this choice: Flint could either sign on with the Detroit water department, which would build a pipeline to deliver treated water from the seemingly unlimited supply of Lake Huron, or build its own pipeline to Lake Huron and treat the water itself at its city plant.
Outrage over a corruption scandal effectively killed the plan for the city to construct its own pipeline. While Flint was weighing its options, three people with insider knowledge were charged with buying land where a pumping station would be built and then reselling it to the city for a personal profit.57 As the case was playing out, Flint’s City Commission, as the council was then called, voted 7–2 to join Detroit’s system. Going forward, the DWSD would provide wholesale water to Flint, which in turn delivered it to local residents and to a number of Genesee County suburbs. Flint also provided water to the GM plants that were increasingly being built in the suburbs.58 The taxes paid by GM would fund the development of these young communities, which would eventually compete with the core city for residents and business.
A few years after the deal was signed, when Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh dedicated the new connection to Flint, he emphasized its public-spirited symbolism. “This marks a further demonstration of a regional problem being solved by a regional government tool,” Cavanagh said at the 1967 ceremonial event.
“We have gone beyond the stage where a community can think no further than its own boundaries,” the mayor continued. “We must be concerned with our neighboring cities. When the problems become too large then we must gather together in common interest to find a mutually beneficial answer.”59
Half a century later, that deal was dissolved. The men in jewel-toned ties gathered in Flint to commemorate its end, toasting the virtues of going it alone in the moments before they turned the water off.
