No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
I.
The wheel turned. Flint entered a new year. Nights came early and stayed late. People switched on their lamps and stayed home in the warmth. But the usual wintertime hush was broken by a wave of chattering journalists and volunteers arriving in town. It was more and more common to come across a reporter clutching a voice recorder in her mitten or a photographer pointing his camera at an empty house or the steely river. Although Flint had been restored to a better water source, it still wasn’t safe to drink straight from the tap. As the national spotlight fixed on this fact, the response to the disaster accelerated.
On January 5, 2016, nearly three months after Flint reconnected to Detroit’s water system, Governor Rick Snyder followed Mayor Weaver and declared a state of emergency. He had been criticized for not acting sooner, but his office defended the delay: he couldn’t make a declaration until both the city and the county had done the same. (Genesee County’s emergency declaration had come one day earlier.1) But the fine points of procedure were no match for the rage that lit up Flint. Nor did the declaration satisfy its furious sympathizers across the state and nation. On the cold evening that Snyder stepped before the House chamber in Lansing to deliver his annual State of the State speech—nearly all of it addressed to the people of Flint—hundreds of protesters banged on the locked doors of the ornate capitol building, shaking its wood panels. They chanted. They tugged futilely at the door handles. They pressed their posters with big block lettering to the windows—“Flint Lives Matter!” “Snyder Has to Go Now!” “Clean Lead-Free Water!”—while blue-uniformed police officers stared back at them through the glass. Their masses poured down the steps of the capitol and out on the lawn, a knot of people in fleece scarves and knit hats, brightened by the reflecting snow, holding the sides of numberless signs: “Arrest Gov. Snyder!” “Justice for Flint!”2
Still, the declaration allowed the state to act: soldiers and airmen from the Michigan National Guard arrived in Flint, tramping in their laced-up boots and camouflage uniforms. Instead of cradling rifles, as in decades past, when the cities were afire, they carried cases of bottled water.3 In a robust outreach, they went door-to-door to some thirty-three thousand homes, delivering free water, filters, and water-testing kits to residents. They also staffed new water distribution sites—first at Flint’s five fire stations and eventually at nine locations, one in each city ward.4 Unlike the earlier stations, these sites would be open indefinitely. Places such as the Masonic Temple in downtown Flint offered free blood tests.5 A mobile health clinic rolled through town. Governor Snyder also asked President Barack Obama to designate Flint as both a federal emergency and a federal disaster, which would bring still more resources to the city to manage the crisis, including grants and low-cost loans to pay for home repairs and business losses, and recovery coordination from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It was a necessary relief effort, but it was, of course, no substitute for the safety and convenience of tap water. Some people stopped using their sinks completely, but others forgot to switch out the unsafe water when they cooked or percolated their morning coffee or made ice cubes. Some believed the water could be purified by boiling it on the stove, though with lead that didn’t help. A woman who filled her humidifiers from her tap believed that she developed lung cancer from the tainted water.6 Ryan Garza of the Detroit Free Press, a photojournalist who lived in Flint, said that he had a testing kit on his counter but was afraid to use it. “What can I do if the lead levels are high?” he asked. He still had to rely on the tap water to shower and wash dishes.7 Outside stores and in parking lots, he watched as mothers awkwardly handled gallon jugs of water to mix their baby formula. Elsewhere, Yvonne Lewis, a longtime leader in community health nonprofits, kept a Crock-Pot in her bathroom so that she could heat bottled water for bathing.8
The appearance of military uniforms at the door felt threatening to the city’s estimated one thousand undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, even if the visit brought free water. Increasing immigration raids over the past year had intimidated many of them from accepting the offer of an urgently needed resource. Some had been turned away from the distribution sites because they had no photo identification (undocumented immigrants in Michigan are banned from obtaining a driver’s license). And very little information about the water crisis appeared in translation. On the east side, one thirty-four-year-old woman, a mother of four children, had been bothered by the rashes on her baby daughter’s back and legs for some time. But she didn’t understand English and so knew nothing about the trouble with the water until immigrant friends told her, nearly two years after the switch.9 Another mother didn’t learn about the lead contamination until she saw a report on Univision, the Spanish-language broadcast network.
An outcry led the state to clarify that proof of citizenship was not necessary to receive water, and to lift the photo ID requirement. Bilingual speakers were made available on the state’s 211 help line, and cards with basic water information were created in English, Arabic, and Spanish. The Genesee County Hispanic/Latino Collaborative and two churches that served the Spanish-speaking community helped to fill the trust gap by going door-to-door in neighborhoods with sizable Hispanic populations, and Flint’s Arab American Heritage Council translated information about water and lead for the city’s small Arab American community.10
It was telling that despite the emergency relief effort, people continued to provide water for each other independently. The Flint-based landlord for the Michigan School for the Deaf worked around the clock one weekend to replace sixty-two faucets in the dormitory and install new filtered fountains.11 Joy Tabernacle Church developed a holistic water distribution site of its own in Civic Park and found ways to reach people in all corners of the community. After reports surfaced that two brothers in their late fifties were trekking two miles a day over icy ground to pick up water from a distribution center, pushing shaky shopping carts back and forth, two Flint women crowdfunded $17,845 from 443 people over six days. They delivered four hundred bottles of water to the brothers’ door, then worked with a company from Detroit to distribute water to other parts of the city where the need was greatest.12
Pastor Sherman McCathern of Joy Tabernacle understood why this was necessary. “It’s hard to believe anybody,” he said. “It’s hard to trust anybody right now.”13 Especially the state institutions that people felt had betrayed them, despite their fix-it promises. And it went even beyond the water. General anger that had simmered for decades now, at long last, had a focal point. The wound was uncommonly clear. The whole world could see it.
Then, on January 13, the same day that the National Guard arrived, Governor Snyder delivered more distressing news. On top of bacterial contamination, TTHM violations, and lead-poisoned water, Flint had suffered an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. It had been plaguing the city for nearly two years, and it had killed people.
II.
In July 1976, mania for America’s Bicentennial was at its peak. Few places were cloaked in more red, white, and blue patriotism than Philadelphia, the old capital where the nation’s founders had signed the Declaration of Independence. More than a decade of planning went into the city’s festivities, including $1 billion worth of concerts, street theater, picnics, fireworks, and a hundred-year time capsule placed at the corner of Second and Chestnut. On the Fourth of July, President Gerald Ford was the guest of honor at a five-hour parade with forty thousand marchers. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip presented the city with a Bicentennial Bell that was forged in the same foundry as the Liberty Bell. A fifty-thousand-pound Sara Lee birthday cake was served at Memorial Hall.14
Philly was the natural place for the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Legion to host its annual convention. The veterans’ organization held it at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, a local landmark in Center City.15 Built with French Renaissance flair, it had more than a thousand guest rooms, a ballroom, and lighting fixtures designed by Thomas Edison himself. The hotel’s reputation for luxury made it a hub for the power set. Fifteen presidents had slept in its rooms, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt. And over a hot July weekend, it housed about six hundred Legionnaires.16 About ten thousand people attended the conference altogether: the Legionnaires, of course, many wearing navy dress caps adorned with patches and pins, as well as their families, friends, and staff.
Afterward, as the crowd returned home, many felt ill. Malaise. Headache. Diarrhea. Coughs. Chest pain. Lung congestion. Fevers reaching as high as 107.4 degrees.17 One physician called state health officials to report a Legionnaire who had symptoms that might be typhoid fever, the kind of waterborne disease that Philly had sought to vanquish nearly two centuries earlier with its pioneering public water system. Scarcely a month after the close of the convention, news outlets from around the country were variously reporting that between six and fourteen of the Legionnaires were dead. Others were hospitalized.18 There was no registration list, so it was difficult to track down all the attendees to see how they were faring, but in the end, using the best count available, it appeared that thirty-four people who attended the convention were killed by the same mysterious illness.19 Another 221 became sick.
The nameless disease that struck war veterans dead, right in the heart of the American Bicentennial, captured national attention. Early reports suggested that they had been struck by a wave of swine flu, but that was just speculation. No one really knew what happened. Frightened friends of at least one Legionnaire skipped his funeral because they worried they might catch whatever it was he had.20 Health experts offered public assurances, but they were nervous, too. The Pennsylvania health secretary worried that the state might be faced with “an unprecedented condition in modern medicine, one for which we had no really effective antibiotics, drugs, or therapy.”21 He considered imposing quarantines and seizing control of hospitals.
That didn’t happen. But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did deploy twenty epidemiologists to Philadelphia, the largest team it had ever sent for a medical investigation.22 They worked with the state to review medical records and autopsy reports and conduct interviews. The “disease detectives” were featured in a Time magazine cover story, “Tracing the Philly Killer.”23 Or, as Newsweek put it in bellowing black-and-white the same week, “Mystery of the Killer Fever.” The publicity caused occupancy at the Bellevue-Stratford to plummet to 4 percent before the hotel temporarily closed.
Testing eliminated seventeen metals as the cause of the outbreak. Poison gases were considered, including nickel carbonyl, but that was ruled out when investigators realized that their autopsy tools were skewing the results. Swine flu, typhoid fever, plague, and ornithosis, a bird-carried virus, were all ruled out.24 Six months passed. It began to look like the mystery might never be solved, and the team of medical sleuths was roundly criticized. There was even a congressional investigation, believed to be the first inquiry by Congress into the cause of a disease. But a breakthrough finally came in January 1977, when a CDC lab scientist traced the outbreak to a previously unknown bacterium that was named for the victims who made it infamous, Legionella pneumophilia. It exists naturally in freshwater systems and doesn’t typically cause problems. But when it grows—it favors warm water with low levels of disinfectant—it becomes dangerous.25
Legionella is inhaled through the microscopic drops of water that make up mists and vapors. It can also enter the lungs if people choke on contaminated water or if it’s used during invasive medical procedures.26 The bacterium loves shower heads, medical respiratory devices, and hot tubs, but it’s especially menacing when it proliferates in the distribution lines of large buildings; that’s when it puts a lot of people at risk, all at once, for Legionnaires’ disease, a virulent inflammation and infection of the lungs. It cannot be transmitted from person to person. It is purely a disease of the environment—and a preventable one.
At the Philadelphia convention, it turned out, the bacteria had bloomed in the hot, damp, cooling towers of the Bellevue-Stratford. It moved through the hotel’s air-conditioning system and then into the lungs of the veterans. Once contracted, Legionnaires’ disease need not be fatal. Hospitals today treat about eight thousand to eighteen thousand cases each year (the CDC believes that many more are misdiagnosed as something else), and about 90 percent of them are treatable with antibiotics.27 One of the great lessons of the Philly outbreak, though, was the importance of consistent, accurate, and transparent communication about the disease, even if it’s still under investigation. Forty years later, in Flint, that lesson would go unheeded.
III.
On Independence Day in 2014, Tim Monahan, a carpenter in his midfifties, watched the fireworks light up the sky from his front yard in Flint. But he didn’t feel well. Even just a couple of hours of helping his neighbor work on her shed had made him feel weak, and now, though it was 90 degrees outside, he was shivering under a thick blanket. His fever hit 104.6 degrees the next afternoon, and he was soon admitted to Hurley Medical Center. After a few days of examination, doctors diagnosed him with Legionellosis, otherwise known as Legionnaires’ disease. Monahan lost twenty pounds, and he had to stay in the hospital for nine days, where he lay on a cooling mat with ice packs pressed against him to ease the heat from his body. But with the help of antibiotics he recovered.
Monahan had contracted one of more than ninety cases of Legionnaires’ disease that were recorded in Genesee County in 2014 and 2015.28 That was more than forty cases a year, compared to the tally in previous years that ranged between six and thirteen cases.29 The disease came in two waves—some consider it two separate outbreaks—but altogether, twelve people died. The surge was one of the worst-ever national epidemics, and it did not escape the notice of the health care community. But a coordinated response was not to be. What followed was an extraordinary tale of buck passing and turf guarding by an alphabet of agencies: Michigan’s environmental and health departments, Flint’s public works department, and the Genesee County Health Department. Other institutions also played a part in the story—the CDC, the EPA, the governor’s office, a local hospital. But for all the heat in this bureaucratic tug-of-war, it never seemed to work out in favor of the people of Flint.
By October 2014, about the time that LeeAnne Walters’s family began to struggle with hair loss, the outbreak was in full swing. Jim Henry, the environmental health director at the Genesee County Health Department, wondered if there might be a connection to Flint’s new water source.30 He tried to involve the city’s public works department and the MDHHS in an investigation, but he didn’t feel that they were responding with sufficient speed. Henry waited for months for the city to answer his questions about its water treatment before resorting to filing a formal public records request. Someone at the MDHHS recommended that Henry’s agency map the cases of Legionnaires’ disease to see if they matched with the city’s water service area, but the state health department didn’t get actively involved in trying to find the source of the outbreak.
The weeks ticked by. By March 2015, Henry was worried that the outbreak would return as the weather became warmer, and he still hadn’t received the FOIA materials he requested from the city months earlier. In an urgent email to a number of people working for the city and the MDEQ, including Mike Prysby, emergency manager Jerry Ambrose, and Mayor Dayne Walling, Henry said that the outbreak was a “significant and urgent public health issue.” Authorities needed to act fast. “The city’s lack of cooperation continues to prevent my office from performing our responsibilities.” The spreading disease, he added, “closely corresponds with the time frame of the switch to the Flint River water. The majority of the cases reside or have an association with the city.… This is rather glaring information and it needs to be looked into now.”
Henry’s warning reached Harvey Hollins in the governor’s office, who worked on urban affairs. Hollins checked in with the MDEQ; if Henry’s concerns were well founded, he would let the governor know. Brad Wurfel’s response was to put the responsibility for investigation back on the county and to say that making a connection to the water source was “beyond irresponsible,” since the county hadn’t provided “any conclusive evidence of where the outbreak is sourced, and it also flies in the face of the very thing a drinking water system is designed to do.”31 At about this time, the EPA also began corresponding with the MDEQ about the uptick in Legionnaires’ disease, but it didn’t take the thread very far. Stephen Busch said that there was no confirmation of Legionella in the water supply, though he cited no data, and he also told Jim Henry it was unlikely that Legionella was in Flint’s water treatment plant, though perhaps there was a connection to the main breaks. Either way, the MDEQ didn’t believe this was its turf; that was Henry’s job. It referred him back to MDHHS.32
But he didn’t get much help from that corner, either, although the agency did begin interviewing people diagnosed with the disease—not fast enough, according to Henry.33 So in an unusual move, his county’s health department leaped over the chain of command and went straight to the CDC, asking if the federal agency would assist by collecting and testing respiratory cultures to track down the cause of the disease. The CDC agreed, and looking at the details of the outbreak—about forty-five cases at this point, and five deaths—one researcher observed that it was “very large, one of the largest we know of in the past decade.”34
Just as Henry was intensifying his investigation, though, the MDHHS brought its involvement to an end. In its May 2015 report, the agency said it was impossible for epidemiologists to determine whether the Legionella crisis was caused by the water switch. In any case, it declared confidently, “the outbreak is over.” This was followed by a scolding for Genesee County for approaching the CDC directly. “Their involvement really should be at the request of the State, rather than the local health department,” the county was told. The state had “not seen any information that would rise to the level of warranting” help from the federal agency.35
From the county’s health department to the MDHHS to the MDEQ to the governor’s office, and back again, with an altogether disappointing response to a fatal outbreak of a rare disease, Jim Henry was led to conclude that state agencies “restricted our actions to the point of interference and inhibition.”36
That summer, his fears were confirmed: the outbreak indeed returned. But people in Flint still received no notice about it. There was no alert for those who were especially vulnerable to Legionnaires’ disease, such as elderly people, or those who had compromised immune systems. Even medical providers were in the dark.37 In comparison, in an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the Bronx that same summer—the largest in New York City history, in which twelve people died—health officials issued a public warning within weeks of the disease’s appearance.38 They provided frequent updates and, after collecting samples and conducting tests, they traced the cause to a hotel cooling tower.
For Flint, there was no news that the outbreak was even happening until twenty months after it began, at Governor Snyder’s press conference in January 2016. The information “was just recently presented to me,” he said, “and I thought it was important to share.” There was no need for people to take additional precautions to protect themselves, and, despite the admonishment sent to Henry, he said that the state had been working with the CDC and the EPA to manage the outbreak since June 2015.39 The numbers Snyder gave were a bit different from the final tally of cases, but it was clear that the disease “adds to the disaster we are all facing,” he said. Nobody could say for sure what had caused the problem.
Most of the sick were men in their sixties, though patients ranged between twenty-six and ninety-four years old.40 A common thread: McLaren hospital in Flint. Forty-six people who became ill had been patients at McLaren, including ten of the twelve who died.41 The hospital hadn’t been oblivious. After noticing the uptick, it had its water system tested and hired a national expert on Legionnaires’ disease as a consultant.
Was the outbreak connected to Flint’s water switch? It would take years to establish the link, and, even then, there was plenty for skeptics to wonder about. Medical providers had collected very few sputum cultures from patients, too few to show a pattern definitively tying the disease to the water.42 And the MDHHS had reported that while about 36 percent of people who had the disease were likely exposed to water sourced from the Flint River, another 30 percent had no known exposure to it in the two weeks before they fell ill.43
There was, however, some glaring circumstantial evidence, not least because the outbreak began shortly after the water switch and largely ceased after the city reverted to Detroit’s supply.44 The CDC, using the few sputum samples that were available, looked for a biological link between cases of the disease and Legionella bacteria detected at McLaren hospital, and in February 2016 it found two matches.45 Also, the Virginia Tech team hypothesized early on that the conditions in Flint could breed Legionnaires’ disease.46 Marc Edwards and four of his Virginia Tech colleagues published a study in Environmental Science & Technology that posited a probable connection to the corrosiveness of the city’s tap water.47 Miguel Del Toral and another water expert from the EPA made a similar case: as the protective lining in Flint’s pipes broke down, depleting the chlorine, Legionella would flourish. Del Toral also speculated that the corrosion might have released Legionella that had been contained in the lining, aggravated by the flushed fire hydrants.48
Almost four years after the disease broke out, big news about its cause finally came from a multi-university investigation led by Wayne State University. Shawn McElmurry, an environmental engineer at Wayne State, had begun looking into it at the request of the governor’s office. In two peer-reviewed studies, McElmurry and his team showed that the risk of the disease grew by more than sixfold across the city’s water distribution system after the switch to the Flint River, and that about 80 percent of cases could be connected to the water supply.49 (The MDHHS, which had initially funded the research, strongly disputed the results.50 So did Marc Edwards, actually, who challenged McElmurry’s credentials.51) Chlorine was a big factor: the less disinfectant in a resident’s tap water, the more likely they were to get sick. That tied back to the problem of iron corrosion in the pipes. Also, McElmurry said under oath that he believed there to have been “undiagnosed cases of Legionnaires’ disease” that might have just been “diagnosed as pneumonia.”52 That resonated with Melissa Mays, the Flint community organizer. Her youngest son had pneumonia back in the summer of 2014. Had it really been Legionnaires’ disease? Was the risk worse than she’d known? “Fear is not knowing,” she said.53
While McLaren hospital wasn’t the sole source of the disease, it had been an incubator of it. And it knew more than it had let on. When Snyder dropped his bombshell of an announcement about the outbreak, it caught the attention of Connie Taylor, a sixty-two-year-old woman from Flint. She had been treated at McLaren in 2014, so she thought that it would be a good idea to request her medical records. Taylor had been admitted for stomach problems, but she felt so much chest pain and exhaustion after being released she returned to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia and moved her to the intensive care unit. They told her daughters that Taylor, a widow, might not survive. But she made it. Her kidneys, however, did not. Taylor was soon on dialysis treatment three days a week, which would continue for the rest of her life, unless she received a kidney transplant. Nobody at McLaren had breathed a word to her about Legionnaires’ disease. But more than a year later, in the roar of new revelations about Flint’s water, Taylor had her records in hand. She had tested positive for Legionella.54
IV.
Both Mayor Karen Weaver and Governor Snyder wanted a federal disaster declaration for Flint, to go along with the emergency support—that would open the door to aid money for infrastructure. But the state’s request was denied and would continue to be denied over its appeals. The reason: federal disaster designations are earmarked for natural emergencies, such as hurricanes, mudslides, and earthquakes. Flint’s disaster was man-made. An exception had been made for Love Canal almost forty years earlier, but there would not be one for Flint. This narrow definition of what counts as a disaster was something the Kerner Report had addressed in the urban crisis of the sixties, recommending an amendment to the Federal Disaster Act to permit federal “assistance to cities during major civil disorders, and provide long-term economic assistance afterwards.”55
Still, other kinds of assistance flooded the city. As the story broke around a scandalized world, it was almost impossible to keep up with the interventions, the rhetoric, the politics, the scores of volunteers and donations and reporters pouring into town. For the first time in a long time, everyone was paying attention to Flint. In the mad rush, it was not easy to sort out the city’s allies from its exploiters; people who came humbly to help versus those who came to use Flint, and its limelight, for their own profit—selling water gadgets to fearful residents, for example, or promoting themselves and their pet projects.
The city got a star turn when the Whiting auditorium in the Cultural Center hosted #JusticeForFlint, a benefit featuring African American filmmakers and performers—among them, Stevie Wonder, Ryan Coogler, Hannibal Burress, Janelle Monae—scheduled on the same night as the Academy Awards. Some two thousand people showed up, mostly locals who received free tickets. With help from the livestream, it raised more than $150,000. Superstar Beyoncé also opened a relief fund for Flint, a move that generated $82,234 for the United Way of Genesee County. Aretha Franklin offered hotel rooms and food vouchers to displaced residents. The owner of the Detroit Pistons, a Flint native, pledged $10 million. General Motors and the United Auto Workers gave $3 million for health and education services.
Flint even became fodder for presidential candidates. Shortly before Michigan held its 2016 Democratic primary, candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held one of their national debates in Flint. The Republican presidential candidates faced questions about the water crisis when they debated in Detroit that same week. Several presidential prospects visited the city during their campaigns, including Donald Trump. Clinton also worked with Mayor Weaver to develop a summer jobs program that employed a hundred local teenagers.56
An abundance of federal agencies also stepped in to give Flint special assistance. There was a massive expansion of Medicaid coverage for people under twenty-one or pregnant or both (a total of fifteen thousand) who were exposed to the water, and they did not necessarily have to live in the city. Another thirty thousand received a greater range of services through Medicaid. A free Disaster Distress helpline connected callers with trained counselors. New programs were designed to make fresh food affordable and accessible, since good nutrition can mitigate some of the effects of lead exposure. The Detroit Free Press published recipes to combat lead’s toxic effects and tips on cutting water use in the kitchen. “Cook with frozen vegetables, which don’t need washing,” it advised. And, “Substitute milk in place of water when it makes sense. Think pancakes and oatmeal.”57
Under this bright spotlight, in a cascade of belated responsiveness, the state and federal governments ramped up their efforts to investigate the disaster. Michigan’s attorney general announced that he was opening a criminal investigation into what had happened in Flint. Because of his inherent conflict of interest—the attorney general’s office is constitutionally required to represent the state—a Detroit-area litigator was appointed as a special prosecutor. Also, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission said that it would carry out its own investigation to see if what transpired had violated residents’ civil rights. Over in Washington, D.C., Congress proclaimed that it too would hold hearings. And the inspector general of the EPA began to look into how the Region 5 office in Chicago had handled the crisis. Chicago director Susan Hedman resigned but later protested the accusations that she had downplayed Miguel Del Toral’s interim report. What’s more, she said, while “this tragedy happened on my watch, I did not make the catastrophic decision to provide drinking water without corrosion control treatment; I did not vote to cut funding for water infrastructure or for EPA. And I did not design the imperfect statutory framework that we rely on to keep our drinking water safe.”58
To help make sense of what had befallen their town, the University of Michigan–Flint created a free one-credit class on the water crisis, open to all. The class, held one block away from the river, featured a mix of experts, from community organizers such as Melissa Mays and Yvonne Lewis to doctors, sociologists, journalists, and public servants. Over a thousand people took part, and many more followed along through videos uploaded onto YouTube. “This will be a class with no assignments,” declared Suzanne Selig, the director of the college’s Public Health Department, on the first day. “Your attendance will be enough. We want to learn from you.”59
For all the incoming goodwill, business owners and boosters who had stuck by Flint now worried that the work they’d put into the city would crumble. There had been genuine progress in recent years.60 UM–Flint had built its first-ever dorm downtown, and it earmarked a former hotel on the riverfront as a second residence hall, designed to attract international students. The farmers’ market had doubled its space for indoor vendors: in its first year at a new location, foot traffic doubled. Flint’s first brewery opened in a repurposed fire station. More than $1 million in philanthropic grants came through to combat crime in north Flint. In a hard-fought transformation, a slice of land outside the Torch Bar called Buckham Alley, between Beach and Saginaw streets, had become a lively public space strung with bright yellow lights, hosting a popular annual music festival. Kathleen Gazall, an architect and Flint native who lived in a rehabbed loft on Saginaw, had helped bring Buckham Alley to life. She felt that people who had once avoided the city had begun to rediscover it, spending their evenings out on dinner, drinks, a show at one of the theaters or museums in the Cultural Center. Now Gazall and her fellow Flint champions worried that anyone thinking of the city would associate it only with fear, poison, and victimhood, erasing Flint’s spirit. To stanch the slide, businesses—restaurants especially—put up hopeful signage to assure passersby: “SAFE WATER HERE.” The university, of course, had spent a small fortune testing its own water, purchasing its own filtration systems, and repairing or replacing corroded water heaters and plumbing fixtures.
People also began reckoning with the effect on the value of their homes and their ability to move. Flint was already a tough market for sellers. In 2015, the median house sold for $28,000. That included both large historic homes, beautifully maintained mansions where auto executives had once lived lavishly, and places that needed a lot of rehab work.61 Of the homes that were occupied, about 50 percent rented for less than $700 a month. The team behind Imagine Flint—the new citywide master plan that included the “Beyond Blight” framework—continued its effort to revive neighborhoods, water crisis be damned.62 But there were losses as well, including an exodus of people for whom the water crisis was just too much.
That included the Walters family. LeeAnne’s husband returned to active duty in the navy, in large part so that the family could get out of Flint.63 He received a post about seven hundred miles away, in Virginia. They packed up the ground zero house on Browning Avenue, the one with the pretty maple trees out front and the new copper pipe that delivered water that still wasn’t trustworthy. Well before the new year, by the time that Flint became an undisputed national catastrophe, they were gone.