All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.
—Paracelsus (early sixteenth century)
I.
Summer is the time of year when Flint becomes lush. Eagles, osprey, and red-tailed hawks linger in the greenery along the Flint River. Wild raspberries grow in the creekside ravines. Community gardeners bring bushels of heirloom tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, green beans, and kale to the farmers’ market. In 2014, when Flint was emerging from its snowiest and coldest winter on record, the warm sun was especially welcome.1 Volunteers led weekly bike rides along the Flint River Trail, with the first ride of the season drawing cyclists between the ages of eight and eighty-four.2 The UAW 598 local of GM workers and retirees held its annual Soberfest family picnic at the Union City Ball Fields, a tradition begun two decades earlier by autoworkers in recovery. Flint Lake Park was brought back to life after years of community cleanups. About one hundred residents celebrated with a picnic under a wooden pavilion, punctuated by the cheers of adults and children as they reeled in catfish from a nearby dock.3
Downtown hummed as well. The historic Flint Journal building was renovated as a teaching space for Michigan State University. A quarter mile away, musicians with the Flint Symphony Orchestra experimented with midday performances at the bus terminal. “I don’t have a car, so even though there might be concerts that may play throughout the area, I don’t have the money or the time,” one woman told an interviewer.4 She skipped her first bus so she could listen awhile longer.
And the city was getting to know its new drinking water. In late May, one month after the switch off of the Detroit system, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality announced the results of the first tests. The Flint River drinking water had residual chlorine and bacteria in it, but not so much that it violated the legal standards. Mike Prysby, an owlish district engineer with the MDEQ, told a reporter that there were “a couple of complaints logged” about the quality, but a different taste and smell was to be expected because river water is naturally harder than the Lake Huron water that Flint drank for decades.5 Hard water has minerals in it, accrued from the earth it flows along, which gives it a distinct taste. Dish soap and shampoo also take a longer time to lather in hard water than soft water, which might be unsettling at first, but it was normal. In any case, the river water was only temporary. The Karegnondi Water Authority was expected to finish construction on its plant and pipeline in about two years. Flint would be back to Great Lakes water soon enough.
This did not satisfy Bethany Hazard. The water coming out of the tap in her west side home seemed murky and foamy. She had survived cancer twice, forcing her into early retirement, and she lived on a limited income. She paid about $90 a month for her water and sewer bill, she said, but nonetheless she started buying bottled water. The new Flint water, she told a Journal reporter, was “just weird.”
Another Flint resident, Lathan Jefferson, was so troubled that within weeks of the switch he contacted officials at the Environmental Protection Agency’s District 5 office in Chicago, the division that oversees environmental issues in Michigan. The manager who took his calls, Jennifer Crooks, described them in an email to her colleagues: “Mr. Jefferson said he and many people have rashes from the new water. He said his doctor says the rash is from the new drinking water, and I told him to have his doctor document this and he can bring it to the attention of the MI DEQ, since lab analyses to date show that the drinking water is meeting all health-based standards.”6
By June 2, less than five weeks after the switch, the local NBC affiliate station reported that Bethany Hazard wasn’t alone. Many residents were “avoiding the tap” and “drinking bottled water instead.”
“I don’t know how it can be clean if it smells and tastes bad,” a bearded middle-aged resident named Senegal Williams told the television reporter.7 His neighbor, a woman with a low voice who wore her hair in braids and did not give her name, agreed. She used bottled water to drink, cook, and wash. “When I’m showering and bathing, my skin feels different. So the smell from the water and the showering kind of convinced me that the water is just not the same.”
Asked to respond, the city said again that the water met all safety requirements and that it was continually monitoring for potential problems. “City officials also say the water is perfectly safe for everybody to drink,” the reporter told viewers.
But in fact there was a problem. A serious one. Flint’s new water treatment program did not include corrosion control. The staff at the plant had been told by the MDEQ that it wasn’t necessary.8 But this was breaking federal law. In the years to come, the question of whether the authorities omitted this knowingly or through a terrible misunderstanding of the law would be a matter of intense dispute. What’s more, the upgrades to the old plant on Dort Highway were not sufficient to deal with the river water, which was more corrosive and difficult to treat than lake water. Together, this was a dangerous combination.
Because America’s infrastructure is generally quite old, large systems are required to add corrosion control treatment to the water to keep the pipes from disintegrating. It extends the life of the pipes and, because it prevents metals from fouling the drinking water, it helps protect public health as well. There are a few different methods to do corrosion control. In about half of all American water companies, including the Detroit system, orthophosphates are added to the water at the treatment plant.9 The orthophosphates—sometimes shorthanded as “phosphates”—create a protective coating that helps keep metals from leaching into the water as it flows through the water mains (the large pipes that run under the street, carrying water to a neighborhood) and the service lines (the smaller pipes that branch off the main, connecting to individual dwellings).
Without orthophosphates or any comparable treatment, the pipes are eaten away, especially when they are old and most especially when they are exposed to a corrosive water source such as the Flint River. There are various reasons why water might be corrosive, but in the river’s case unusually high chloride levels were part of it.10 Chlorides exist in most drinking water without causing any trouble.11 But in large amounts they break down the metals in water mains, service lines, water heaters, household appliances, and plumbing fixtures.12 Rivers and streams in northern climates such as in Michigan are particularly vulnerable to high chloride levels because they absorb runoff from the road salt (sodium chloride) that has been widely used as a deicer since the 1970s.13 And the water is shallower in rivers and streams, which makes them more concentrated. High chloride levels also come from agricultural runoff and wastewater. Flint’s treatment plant added still more to the mix by using ferric chloride as a coagulant for the water.14
Whatever the source, without proper treatment, corrosive water causes pipes to rust, flake, and leak. The brown water that Pastor Sherman McCathern saw gushing from the Civic Park fire hydrants, dark as coffee: that was corroded iron. Flint residents did not yet know the details of all this. But they did know that the water stank. As Reverend Barbara Bettis, who lived in southeastern Flint, said at a council meeting that summer, “It’s nasty, and we shouldn’t even be drinking it.”15
To add insult to injury, this weird water was expensive. Residents were charged about $140 per month on their water and sewer bills—$35 more than the town with the second-highest rates in Genesee County and $90 more than the lowest. For just water, not including sewer, their bills were about twice the median cost in the water-rich Midwest.16 Out of the five hundred largest water systems in America, Flint’s rates were the very highest.17 This made for some peculiar juxtapositions. One man, Nijal Williams, paid almost $65 more per month for his water and sewer service than his neighbors who lived just one hundred yards away but who had an address in Burton, the town on the other side of Flint’s southeastern border. Some suburban leaders saw this as an opportunity. In the unincorporated community of Beecher, which also shares a border with Flint, an administrative superintendent put it bluntly to a reporter: “I hope people read this [article about high water rates in Flint] and move to Beecher.… We’re the cheapest around.”
These prices hurt people with limited resources. Nearly 80 percent of working residents in Flint earned $40,000 or less a year. Forty percent of them earned $15,000 or less.18 The United Nations recommends that water and sewer bills be not more than 3 percent of a household’s income. In Flint, the bills were well beyond that.19
Expensive water was a direct result of Flint’s depletion. The infrastructure, of course, didn’t shrink along with the population. Not only were the pipes designed for double Flint’s current population—and then some, going by the optimistic projections of the 1960s—but they were built with a wide circumference to sustain all those chuffing GM plants. Now those huge lines needed to be kept up by a community that was much smaller and poorer. It is far more costly to wait until water mains fail before fixing them, but for Flint the money just wasn’t there anymore.20 About half the city’s water supply was lost through leaky lines—it’s been known to have nearly three hundred main breaks in a single year—which pushed the bills up even more.21
Whether a city is well-to-do, struggling, or somewhere in between, there are a thousand reasons for local officials to delay maintaining or replacing the old pipes. It’s easy to forget about them, for one thing. The pipes are underground and, unless something goes wrong, largely invisible. Replacing them is very expensive, and money for infrastructure is harder than ever to come by. In 1976, two years after the Safe Drinking Water Act passed, federal funding provided utilities with $17 billion to keep their infrastructure in good condition. By 2014, that had fallen to $4.3 billion.22 Also, a full upgrade would take years to complete, extending well beyond any individual’s elected term. And water infrastructure is rarely a top priority for residents. When it requires disruptive trench digging and road closures, or higher taxes, it can even anger people. There’s also often a lot of disputes about who is responsible for what. Public drinking water systems are generally responsible for the water mains that run under the street, but property owners are held responsible for all or part of the service lines. And for all the trouble that can come out of improving the infrastructure, you don’t even get the satisfaction of a proper ribbon cutting.23
As a result, water infrastructure all over the United States hasn’t been upgraded in decades. In Flint, the average main was more than eighty years old.24 More than fifteen thousand lead service lines were laid so long ago that nobody really knew where they were. The only way to locate them was to sort through forty-five thousand index cards kept in a big file drawer, deciphering smeared pencil handwriting to read someone’s incomplete notes about which pipes were made of what.25 Flint’s distribution system included nearly four thousand fire hydrants, the oldest of which was more than fifty years old, and more than seventy-two hundred valves, which were never replaced unless they outright failed.26
Flint’s infrastructure was in a death spiral. The water rates were expensive because the pipes were bad because vacancy rates were high because the city had been shrinking for so long. Costly bills tempted residents to move to the suburbs, as the city administrator in Beecher hoped they would. Then there were even fewer people to pay into the system, which meant there was even less money to maintain it, which meant rates went up further. Repeat ad infinitum.
So it was easy to understand the desire to make Flint’s drinking water more affordable. The switch off of the Detroit system was pitched as a way to do just that. As per an annual water report delivered to residents, the use of the Flint River “was a temporary move driven largely by economics and the financial state of the city.”27 But then the bills kept rising. In the early summer, just a couple of months after the switch, Emergency Manager Darnell Earley proposed a budget that included a 6.5 percent hike in water and sewer rates for the first year and another 6 percent increase the following year.28 Flint was no longer paying Detroit’s wholesale prices, but it turned out that setting up the infrastructure for a new temporary water system and operating it with fewer ratepayers—the Genesee County suburbs opted to stick with Detroit water—was not an especially economical plan.29
Although Earley did not need the approval of the City Council, the mayor, or the community to enact his proposed budget, he decided not to proceed until people had a chance to speak their minds. About a dozen people attended one public meeting, where a resident of the Mott Park neighborhood declared that she is “trying really hard to support the emergency manager,” but Flint’s budget problems could not be fixed “on the backs of working people.” The council president sympathized with this. “The people I feel really sorry for are the senior citizens who are on a fixed income and can’t afford to move,” he said. “They’ve become prisoners.”30
Nonetheless, Earley signed the budget including the price hike. Monthly bills could now reach an average of $149, compared to the average in neighboring Burton of less than $58.31 “As much as the high rates for providing water and sewer services pose significant financial challenges and community implications,” read the adopted budget, “the alternative of not addressing basic maintenance … is equally challenging.”32 Earley also carved out money for six new jobs to help with the recently revived treatment plant.
But it was all too much for city councilman Wantwaz Davis of the Fifth Ward. Coming after a series of dramatic rate hikes in recent years, he had no patience for more. He led the second of a series of summer demonstrations that protested the unaffordability of the water, even now, when it was under local control.33 About a hundred people congregated outside city hall on Saginaw Street, joined by pastors, who offered a predemonstration prayer, and young people, including a teenager who carried a bright green poster: “No More High Water Bills.” When Davis had the soapbox, he read from 1 Corinthians off his smartphone and urged protesters to drum up the kind of national attention to social inequities in Flint that Detroit was getting. The big city to the south was swamped with reporters and documentarians when it declared bankruptcy that summer, the largest of its kind in U.S. history. “People cannot afford their water bills,” Davis said. “It’s surpassed their capacity. The bills are unreasonable, and should be brought down to a level low-income people can afford. You can go without food, but not water.” Aaron Dionne, vice president of the Genesee County landlords’ association, added that the water rates were “killing our business. Our tenants can’t afford [water], so they’re finding ways to turn it on illegally. We need some sort of attention. We just need something done. I don’t understand how the emergency manager can come in here and kill big business like this.”34
One person who was acutely aware of the risks of unaffordable water was Laura Sullivan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University, a cooperative college where about two thousand students attend classes. As the water rates escalated, she and her students experimented with ways to distribute rain barrels to neighborhoods where there had been a lot of shutoffs due to unpaid bills so that people could meet their basic sanitation needs. That in turn could fend off a public health crisis.35
The switch to river water worried Sullivan, but she believed the authorities when they said it was safe to drink. At her home in southwestern Flint, the water didn’t look or taste bad. Mostly, she figured, people complaining about its quality were just reacting to the morbid stories that had been passed down from one generation to another about pollution in the Flint River. The river was vastly improved nowadays. The community was haunted more by old legends than by bad water, Sullivan believed, and if people understood the thorough treatment process that water goes through, they’d realize that it was fine.
II.
Many of Flint’s most gracious houses are in the College Cultural neighborhood. If you walked along its streets in the summer of 2014, you’d see stately Tudors, Colonials, and ornate cottages. Any one of them could have been plucked from a fairy tale. But in the patches of grass out front, you’d also come across the sight of one open fire hydrant after another. “In response to localized complaints of discolored water,” a press statement explained, city workers were opening the hydrants, letting the water rush out and pool uselessly on the ground.36 They did the same thing in other neighborhoods, too, including downtown and eventually Civic Park. The idea was to push the muddiness out of the supply. In the huge water mains that ran beneath the closed manufacturing plants and depopulated streets, water sat stagnant for too long. Without enough residents or big industries to keep the water moving at a quick clip, the contaminants became more concentrated. “Residents in the affected areas may see increased water cloudiness for a short time, but the water will be safe to drink,” the city authorities said in a statement to a local news outlet, adding, as usual, the assurance that the “water throughout the City meets all required drinking water standards.”37
Explanations for the brown-tinged water were vague and contradictory. When asked about the discoloration by the dogged Ron Fonger of the Flint Journal, the city spokesperson said he wasn’t sure. A couple of weeks later, Mike Prysby of the MDEQ told a reporter in Detroit that the color was the result of workers’ “unauthorized drafting of water from fire hydrants in these areas for street sweeping activities.”38 That, plus frequent main breaks, stirred up sediment and rust in the pipes, which caused the discoloration. The unauthorized hydrant use, he said, “will be discontinued.”
So some officials said that open hydrants would help solve the discoloration problem: they cleared the water by moving it through the system faster. Others said that open hydrants were contributing to the problem: the surge of water caused iron to flake off the mains. The city’s annual water quality report opted for an all-encompassing explanation: the rusty color was due to the “change in source water, water main breaks, and routine maintenance” that caused the cast iron pipes to deteriorate faster than usual.39 Among the steps taken to fix the problem would be more flushing—open hydrants—and budgeting for the repair of a twenty-four-foot water main in an unspecified “area of concern.”
It was all very confusing. But public figures spent the summer counseling residents to have patience as they worked out the kinks. “It’s a quality, safe product,” said Mayor Dayne Walling. “I think people are wasting their precious money buying bottled water.”40
Walling was deferring to the expertise of the MDEQ, just as the EPA had done when residents called the federal agency to report problems back in May. The state’s top drinking water authorities, Prysby and Stephen Busch among them, insisted that the water was safe, and there seemed to be no reason not to trust them. They were charged with serving the public good, after all. Darnell Earley also stood by the water. “We understand there are going to be complaints,” he said, but until the MDEQ declared it to be unsafe, “it will be the water source” for Flint.41
And yet before the end of the summer, the city issued three separate boil-water advisories in a span of twenty-two days.42 These relatively common notices come when there’s a system disturbance that could affect water quality, such as a drop in pressure caused by a broken main or maintenance work. Boiling water is a precaution that kills bacteria and other harmful organisms. But in Flint, which was already uneasy about this expensive and strange-tasting water, the advisories did not seem ordinary at all. They felt like an evil spell.
The first notice came on August 16 after fecal coliform bacteria, also known as E. coli, had been detected.43 It was a surprising discovery. Statewide, the bacteria show up in drinking water about three times a year on average, and sometimes not at all.44 Its presence suggests that the water is contaminated by human or animal feces, which can make people ill, especially older people, young children, and those with weak immune systems. The advisory covered half a square mile on the city’s west side. Everybody with a tap was told to boil water for one minute before drinking, bathing, brushing teeth, washing dishes, cooking, or making ice. Or they could purchase bottled water.
Follow-up tests were negative. But there were positive results for total coliforms, a group of microorganisms that includes E. coli, so the advisory was kept in place for four days. Still, the city and state said the first test seemed to be a one-off abnormality—maybe even a sampling error.
“We don’t know yet what caused this,” said the MDEQ’s Mike Prysby in response to questions. “We don’t have a smoking pistol.”45
He still didn’t have one when the city issued a second boil-water advisory, on September 5. It covered a different swath of the city, this time encompassing Civic Park and the campus of Kettering University. The advisory forced the manager of a popular restaurant to go to a store each day to buy canned and bottled drinks for his customers. An elementary school that was barely outside the advisory area shut down its water fountains, just to be safe. It depended on the school district and parents to bring bottled water for the children.46
Follow-up tests were just like before—a positive test for total coliform bacteria, an extension of the advisory to four days total. It was still in effect when yet another boil-water advisory was issued, on September 6, for part of the city’s west side, again covering Civic Park. Total coliform bacteria. Three days.
Three advisories over a period of three weeks, each one reaching farther into Flint.47 No doubt that it was a sign of system weakness, Darnell Earley acknowledged, but it was not “an actual threat to citizen safety.”48 A Journal reporter ran that claim by both Mike Prysby and a water expert at Michigan State University. Both agreed that the advisories were a red flag but did not pose an inherent danger to residents. As a fix, the city announced that it would increase the disinfecting chlorine treatment and flush the system in the advisory areas. Earley also pointed to the $11 million allocated to water and sewer infrastructure in his adopted budget. It was a level of investment that the city had not seen in decades.
But these were solutions for a problem that did not yet have a name. Officials were saying different things about what caused the E. coli contamination in the first place, just as they had conflicting explanations for the discoloration. Earley said he would open an investigation to find the cause. Prysby speculated that the problem could have originated with the main breaks, or improper chlorine levels, or maybe with a faulty collection of water samples—in that case, it was a process problem that had unduly given the appearance of unsafe water. And Howard Croft, a Flint native who ran the city’s Department of Public Works, said on the radio that the contamination was caused by a broken valve on an “ancient water system” and that it would take a long time to replace it.49
There was agreement on one thing: the water leaving the treatment plant off Dort Highway met the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. People could drink it without worry. That’s what city and state officials said, over and over and over, in public statements, news reports, interviews, and at meetings: the water was safe. The deadening drumbeat would last for another year.