Thousands have lived without love; not one without water.
—W. H. Auden, “First Things First” (1957)
I.
The General Motors engine plant sprawled over 1.2 million square feet, a long, white, windowless expanse of modern industry on West Bristol Road in Flint. It was filled with about eight hundred workers, most of them making hourly wages, who built engines for the Chevrolet Cruze and the Chevrolet Volt.1 They needed about seventy-five thousand gallons of water a day to do the job. But in the summer of 2014, workers noticed that rust was forming on engine crankshafts and blocks. Suspecting that Flint’s new water supply was causing the problem, GM experimented with a costly reverse osmosis technique to purify it. The company also tried diluting it with water from Detroit that it brought in on semi-trucks. But nothing worked.
In October, a little more than a month after three boil-water advisories swept Flint, GM announced a water switch of its own. It made a deal to buy Lake Huron water from the neighboring suburb of Flint Township. This was one of the communities that had also joined the Karegnondi Water Authority but still used water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department until the new system was ready.
For all the diminishment of GM in the city where it was born, it was still Flint’s largest employer and one of its biggest taxpayers.2 The engine plant’s switch would cost Flint about $400,000 in water revenue per year. But GM promised that it would return to the city system once the KWA was in operation. Two other GM facilities in Flint, an assembly plant and a stamping plant, both of which used less water, remained on the city system.
The city needed to give permission for the deal to go through, and under the authority of emergency manager Darnell Earley that was done without much hassle. But some council members worried that the change would incite a panic. They wondered whether the company’s move would prompt other businesses to leave the system. Seventh Ward councilwoman Monica Galloway said she had the uncomfortable feeling that by remaining on river water that was unsuitable for GM, “we are like guinea pigs. It’s like a research project” of the kind that would normally be done “on rats.”
The headlines—“General Motors Shutting off Flint River Water at Engine Plant over Corrosion Worries”—did indeed trigger alarm.3 The day she heard the news, Jan Burgess, a legally blind homeowner in her early sixties, complained to the EPA through its website.4 “People in Flint have had to resort to buying bottled water or having purification systems installed in their homes,” Burgess wrote. Some had private wells dug. “The water is not safe to drink, cook, or wash dishes with, or even give to pets. We worry every time we shower. The City of Flint is still very economically depressed and most citizens cannot afford to do anything other than use the river water.”
The anxiety reverberated all the way to the state capital, Lansing, where Governor Rick Snyder was weeks away from winning reelection to a second term. His chief legal counsel, Michael Gadola, wrote in an email: “To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary. Too bad the [emergency manager] didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others. My Mom is a City resident. Nice to know she’s drinking water with elevated chlorine levels and fecal coliform.… They should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control.”5
But that didn’t happen. Darnell Earley argued that it would be too expensive and that any problems at the plant were fixable. He had no expertise in water treatment, of course; he was relying on people such as Mike Prysby, the district engineer for the Michigan Department for Environmental Quality. Like a ringmaster improvising as the set goes up in flames, Prysby assured everyone that there was no need for worry. While rust was spreading like a stain on GM’s machinery, probably due to high chloride levels in the water, Prysby said the chlorides were well within public safety regulations. He reported measurements that showed the chlorides at less than a quarter of the amount that would be legally unacceptable.6 So Prysby urged everyone to avoid “branding Flint’s water as ‘corrosive’ from a public health standpoint, simply because it did not meet a manufacturing facility’s limit for production.”
Over at Kettering University, a GM representative happened to visit the campus. Mechanical engineering professor Laura Sullivan seized the opportunity to ask about the company’s water switch. She was informed that the corrosion had appeared because the plant recycled its water four or five times. “After we’ve used it,” she remembered being told, “we run it back through a few times. And it really is only a problem on the last run through because it’s gotten concentrated.” Concentrated, that is, because with every use, some of the water is lost as steam. This made sense to Sullivan. She reported back to her friends and colleagues who were wondering if it was safe to drink from the tap. “They’re running [the water] through their machines four times,” she advised them. “I mean, obviously that’s not the same as what you’re drinking. I really think it’s fine.”7
Whatever the reason for the rust, GM workers were unsettled. They didn’t just use the water for manufacturing. They had used it to brew coffee and wash their hands, take showers, and sip something cool when they were thirsty. Even after the plant went back to Detroit water, many workers lived in the city, or they had family and friends who did. When they visited a downtown restaurant, their glasses were filled with tap water and crackling ice. At school, their children sipped from the drinking fountains. Over at the UAW, members were beginning to ask, “If it’s too corrosive for an engine, what’s it doing to the inside of a person?”8
II.
On a January evening in 2015, cold enough to make your eyes water, hundreds of people packed into the fellowship hall of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, a large brown building less than a mile from the Flint River. It was standing room only. Some folks kept their winter jackets and their stocking caps on. Mayor Dayne Walling was there, as well as public works director Howard Croft, state representative Sheldon Neeley, and members of the City Council. They settled in to hear the stories of their constituents, some of whom shook with anger or wept. Only hours before the meeting, there had been another protest downtown, one of several in the past week. Winter weather seemed to deter no one from outdoor demonstrations. People needed to be seen.
The situation was getting murkier. The MDEQ had just informed the city that its water violated the federal limit for total trihalomethanes, or TTHMs. This is a group of four colorless, odorless chemical compounds that are a by-product of the chlorine disinfection process. (This was also what the governor’s legal counsel was referring to months earlier when he mentioned “elevated chlorine levels” in his exasperated email message.) When ingested over many years, TTHMs can increase the risk of cancer and cause liver, kidney, and nervous system problems. It was a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and so, as required by law, a notice was mailed to Flint residents on January 2.9 They were told that steps were being taken to fix the problem, including the installation of a TTHM monitor and a charcoal filter at the treatment plant. “This is not an emergency,” the notice repeated several times. If it had been, the city would’ve been required to notify residents within twenty-four hours. At the same time, though, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems were advised to talk to their doctor about drinking the water.
This satisfied no one. Coming after GM said the water wasn’t good enough for making engines, it was especially upsetting. Business at local restaurants was down—people seemed nervous about eating food cooked with city water. The manager of a popular Mexican restaurant said that he’d lost about a quarter of his clientele. Customers yelled at waiters or left handfuls of change as tips because they didn’t like paying extra for bottled water when the tap water was compromised. Hospitals stocked up on bottled water to treat specialized equipment that, like the GM machinery, had not fared well. The executive chef for Flint’s public schools had long since started buying gallons of water in bulk for the food served to students.10 People traded hair-raising stories. Corodon Maynard, a twenty-year-old who lived on Flint’s east side, said that a few hours after he drank two glasses of water, he was retching over a toilet. “I was throwing up like bleach water. It came up through my nose burning,” he told a reporter.11 Cancer survivor Bethany Hazard spotted brown rust circles around her drains and an inexplicable oily film in her bathwater. Her cats were sick. Her houseplant was on its deathbed. Residents pushed bottles of ugly water into officials’ faces. “Look!” they said. “Look!”
There were whispers of a lawsuit. One woman started the Flint Water Class Action Group on Facebook, which quickly attracted more than thirteen hundred members and would grow well beyond that. Activists in the Democracy Defense League, which had been formed to oppose emergency management, announced their own investigation. The league had already begun holding bottled water drives, but now it planned to host neighborhood workshops about how residents could challenge “plummeting water quality, soaring water rates,” and “alleged water theft,” which referred to the arrest and prosecution of people who set up illicit connections after their water service had been turned off for unpaid bills.
Under the dull fluorescent lights at Antioch Missionary Baptist, more disturbing stories were added to the record. Qiana Dawson said that her children, ages four and two, were breaking out in rashes and her doctor’s bills were way up. LeeAnne Walters, a sharp-eyed woman with long, dark hair, worried about similar skin problems on one of her sons, a three-year-old with a compromised immune system.12 Councilman Eric Mays, who called the meeting, framed the problem bluntly. “The water is bad,” he said, “and if you buy a bad product, you return it for a refund. While researchers try to figure out the Flint water, we should turn the Detroit water back on,” Mays said. The room exploded in applause.
This was possible. The day before the meeting, Sue McCormick, director of the DWSD, wrote to Mayor Walling and Darnell Earley, offering them a deal. We “take very seriously the matter of drinking water quality,” she wrote with an overabundance of sedate professionalism, “and we are as concerned as you must be by the continued quality issues faced by the city and the concerns expressed by your citizens.”13 She presented the city with “a solution for reliable, safe, high quality water on an expeditious timeline.” If Flint signed a long-term contract, the DWSD would waive the reconnection fee, estimated at $4 million. Flint could return to the terms of its old contract, though it would be revised to reflect the 4 percent price increase that had gone into effect for wholesale customers the previous summer. The DWSD, McCormick wrote, was “ready, willing, and able” to resume services to Flint immediately “if you so desire.”
But going back to Detroit water was too costly, Earley insisted at the church meeting, even if the reconnection fee was waived, and especially if it required a lengthy contract. The DWSD’s rates could rise again as soon as July, and Flint would be right back where it was before, fighting a hopeless battle against expensive water over which it had essentially no local control. Besides, the terms of Flint’s contract with the KWA were unusually punishing. Not only would the millions of dollars spent on upgrades for the treatment plant be for naught, but if Flint left the KWA, it would still be on the hook for 30 percent of its costs—about $85 million of a $300 million project. That translated into seven-figure annual bond payments. If Flint missed a single one, the KWA could seize the city’s treatment plant, plus 25 percent of its state revenue-sharing money. It could also get its share of the money by forcing Flint to levy a tax. Basically, Flint was paying for the KWA either way, so it was best to stick with it.
While the city “can ill-afford to switch course,” Earley said, he promised to hire a consultant to correct the troublesome water treatment.14 That would end up being Veolia, an enormous multinational company that prides itself as being “the world’s leading provider of environmental solutions.”15 Mayor Walling, too, said that he preferred investing in the city’s “own system at the treatment plant and on fixing older pipes throughout Flint,” rather than going back to the DWSD and “paying their premium.” Still, as Walling wrote on social media and in a letter to Governor Rick Snyder, Flint needed more water testing; lowered bills; elimination of reconnection fees for those who had been cut off; and millions in state or federal funds to improve the aging infrastructure. He also wanted assistance for people whose doctors advised them to stop drinking the city water.16 At the same time, the Flint River was cleaner now than it had been in years. The state environmental experts were certain that it was safe. He and his family continued to drink city water.
A week after the gathering at the church, there was another meeting about the water, this time in the domed auditorium of city hall. A panel of experts spoke to a crowd of about 150, some of whom had tucked bottles of discolored water in their bags and coat pockets.17 “Is there a risk in the short-term?” the MDEQ’s Stephen Busch asked attendees.18 “That depends on you … it’s an individual thing. You can make a judgment after talking to your doctor.” At the same time, Busch said that the water was both good to drink and improving. In other words, the water isn’t a risk to your health—unless it is. Furious people shouted back. Others walked out in frustration. One woman reportedly tugged down part of her pants to show the authorities the red rash on her buttocks.19 Before answering all the questions submitted in writing, Howard Croft, the public works director, brought the unruly meeting to an end.
The city trumpeted an offer to provide free water tests to anyone who requested one. Croft called it one-on-one civil service. The city would learn what was going on in individual homes, which was important because the complaints did not sync with the current results. And residents could learn about the different factors that affect water quality. But by now, the tension in Flint had reached such a feverish pitch that famed activist Erin Brockovich was weighing in on Facebook. Flint was one of “hundreds” of cities and towns whose community water systems are failing, she wrote. “Bottom line, they have made many bad choices … yet [there] are real solutions.” In the meantime, it was a fog of “EXCUSES … EXCUSES … EXCUSES.”20
In mid-January, not long before the meeting in the city hall dome, Jerry Ambrose became Flint’s new emergency manager, effectively filling in the tail end of Earley’s term after Earley accepted a job as the EM of Detroit’s public schools.21 Ambrose had been serving as finance director, so he was quite familiar with the water struggles. He picked up where his predecessor left off. Ambrose agreed that there were insurmountable barriers to reconnecting with Detroit, including the fact that the city no longer had a direct line to the Detroit system. Earley had sold a critical nine-mile section of transmission pipe to Genesee County the previous year for $3.9 million.22 The county used it for its own drinking water.23
Ambrose believed that the city handled the TTHM crisis as well as could be expected. Flint had surpassed the legal limit for carcinogenic TTHMs in May, August, and November of the previous year, but it didn’t alert residents until January because it was legally required to announce only a high annual average. The first notice was sent nine months after the initial violation. Ambrose defended the delay at a public meeting. In a neat suit and tie, speaking into a microphone, he gestured before a restless crowd. “When we knew, we started immediately to address the problem,” he said.24
“Without telling the public!” said Claire McClinton. The distinctive voice of the leader of the Democracy Defense League rose above the chorus of rumblings.
Ambrose’s face hardened. “We’re telling you now.”
In the midst of this standoff, the State of Michigan made a quiet but revealing change: installing new water coolers in its Flint offices and supplying them with cases of bottled water. State employees were spared from drinking Flint’s tap water. “While the City of Flint states that corrective actions are not necessary,” a notice to the staff of one state department said, we are “in the process of providing a water cooler on each occupied floor, positioned near the water fountain, so you can choose which water to drink. The coolers will … be provided as long as the public water does not meet treatment requirements.”25 So, while one state department told residents that the water was safe to drink, another doubted it enough that it, like General Motors, preferred to pay for a new supply.
In early February, Governor Snyder announced a $2 million grant to hire a consultant to find leaky water lines and to replace Flint’s wastewater incinerator. The old facility, which cleaned the city’s wastewater before discharging it into the river, no longer met environmental standards. The money came from a program for financially distressed communities, and Flint’s award was the maximum sum allowed.26 But Dayne Walling thought Flint needed at least $50 million over the next six years to fix the plant and the pipes. The grant, he said, was “a down payment” on the state’s responsibility to provide safe, clean water to an emergency-managed city. Flint needed more. As Sheldon Neeley, its state representative, wrote in a letter to the governor, people “are on the verge of civil unrest.”27
III.
BB Nolden gave up. The ex–city councilman and now Genesee County commissioner bought his water from the grocery store. It took about eight gallons a week for all the cooking, cleaning, teeth brushing, and drinking. He still needed to shower in the city water, so he began using a large amount of lotion to soothe his dry, irritated skin. “It’s extremely trying,” Nolden said later.28 “It’s time inhibitive.… I used the bottle water for everything.”
Not everyone in Flint was having the same experience. Some saw an orange or brown tinge in their water when they filled their sinks, but in other homes, including the one where Laura Sullivan lived in southwestern Flint, among historic mansions from the city’s twentieth-century heyday, the taps ran perfectly clear. Some had water with a distinct chlorinated odor or the smell of rotten eggs; others did not. From the city’s perspective, tests showed that the water was safe when it left the plant. Its supervising agency, the MDEQ, agreed. Discoloration happened when the water sat too long in the oversized pipes that crisscrossed a landscape with long stretches of vacancy. The city tried to help where it could by flushing the hydrants, but there was only so much it could do to keep the water moving when the infrastructure was built for twice the population. In the meantime, discoloration and odors, in and of themselves, did not mean that the water was bad.29 And as for all the horror stories—rashes, hair loss, nausea, and worse—they were just anecdotes. Distressing, to be sure, but no one had proved beyond a doubt that it was the water causing their problems. It could have been anything. Maybe even just bad luck.
This was partly right. The contamination was indeed worse when the water sat stagnant for too long. But the contradictory reports were not random: they more or less followed the pattern of inequality that dated back to Flint’s development as a segregated city. People who lived on streets that were pockmarked with the most unoccupied homes and empty storefronts—that is, the poorest of them—generally had worse water. People who lived in denser areas were less likely to see, taste, or smell the same problems.
But there was some good news. Early tests in 2015 showed that the TTHMs in the water had dropped to an acceptable level.30 “Possible causes and corrective measures” had been identified, a city notice claimed, although it didn’t offer an explanation for what had caused the problem in the first place.31 The suspect seemed to be over-chlorination. Since the treatment plant didn’t have an activated carbon filter, and river water had so much organic matter, chlorine had been used excessively to disinfect the water. The city said that getting a filter was now a priority.32
For people working for Flint’s revitalization, there were plenty of other demands on their attention. BB Nolden asked Mayor Walling for the keys to the old Berston Field House in north Flint, which had fallen into neglect. After years of doing what he could by opening the doors “just to give the kids something to do,” multiyear grant support came through. As volunteer director, Nolden led Berston’s revival, programming it with everything from ballet to boxing—and doing it much more inclusively than the old days, when its segregated pool was notorious. Meanwhile, the city planning commission adopted a five-year framework to deal with decrepit properties. “Beyond Blight” was developed with help from more than two dozen community groups as a data-driven strategy to eliminate blight in every neighborhood. That included about 22,000 houses, commercial buildings, and vacant lots—more than one third of all the properties in Flint.33 Of those, about 5,500 needed to be demolished, mostly houses; another 5,000 were to be boarded; and 850 houses were to be rehabilitated. That, plus better property code enforcement and maintenance, would vastly improve the quality of life. The plan would cost more than $100 million to implement. Until it was funded, volunteers would sign up to plant clover on vacant lots and mow the lawns of thousands of empty properties. It was a start.
Elsewhere, Chevy in the Hole, a former GM manufacturing complex that had become a ruin, got new life. Once the setting for the sit-down strike in the 1930s, it would be transformed into a park along the Flint River with wetlands, woodlands, walking paths, and native plants. It would get a new public-spirited name: Chevy Commons. In preparation for the redevelopment, led by the county land bank and funded by a federal grant, thousands of trees were planted to remove contaminants from the soil. And over at the historic ice rink on Lapeer Road, once the home of the popular minor-league Flint Generals, the Ontario Hockey League announced the name of a new team that it was bringing to the city. After a contest that drew four thousand submissions, the league picked the Firebirds as the team mascot. “Flint is a community that has been built and sustained on the fierce resilience of its residents, and we see the Firebird as a symbol of that resilience,” the team president said in a press release. “Flint has pulled through a difficult journey, and is now standing on the verge of great potential and promise.”34
Yet, all along, the water complaints kept coming. On February 4, LeeAnne Walters showed the City Council a video of the rashes on her young son’s skin. And over at the Chicago office of the EPA, Jennifer Crooks was getting an earful. “Let me tell you, this Flint situation is a nasty issue,” she wrote in an email. “I’ve had people call me 4 letter words over the phone, yell at me and call me a crook. I’m developing a thick skin.”35 Two days later, she called the complaints “ticking time bombs.”
In March, the City Council voted to “do all things necessary to reconnect to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.”36 But emergency manager Jerry Ambrose was the only one with the power to act, and he disagreed, calling the vote “incomprehensible”: a switch back would cost more than $12 million a year. Touching on the long-simmering anger over high rates, he claimed that “water from Detroit is no safer than water from Flint. Users also pay some of the highest rates in the state because of the decreased numbers of users and the age of the system.” What’s more, Ambrose told yet another crowd at yet another meeting, the DWSD had forced the city to switch to the Flint River. “It was Detroit that sent us a letter that said, ‘We’re canceling your contract. Go find your water someplace else.’ All right?”37 He was referring to a pro forma letter the DWSD had sent when Flint signed the KWA contract. But he failed to mention that Detroit had made repeated offers to restore service, which had been rejected, and that many Genesee County communities, also without an active contract, were still using Detroit water until the KWA was ready.
Ambrose was a month away from leaving office. Governor Snyder would soon announce that the financial disaster in Flint was over and that the city would return to the leadership of its elected mayor and council. Flint would still have to report to a state receivership board, though, for an indefinite length of time, and it was customary for EMs to bar their decisions from being overturned for at least a year after their term finished. However, Flint still had a deficit of about $7 million. Ambrose and the Michigan treasurer resolved it with a last-minute emergency loan. The loan came with a provision that blocked the city from switching its water supply or lowering rates without state approval. A return to Detroit water was impossible.38
When it came to safe drinking water, then, people had to fend for themselves. It was a far cry from the spirit of collectivity that once built the infrastructure of American cities. It was more like the early days when citizens were expected to dig their own wells, even if they drained their neighbor’s well as they did so.
This is what an atomized approach to urban life looked like. A GM plant trying to treat water on its own, and then trucking it in from elsewhere, before finally giving up and contracting with another municipality for its water supply. The State of Michigan distributing water coolers to its offices in Flint, even as its environmental department told residents that the water was fine. Parents left to make judgment calls about whether there was a connection between the river water and the health ailments that befell their families.
Residents did their best to look out for each other. A Head Start program spent some of its limited money to buy bottled water for small children. Volunteer groups held water giveaways around town. Flint Strong, a group that promotes the city, distributed two hundred cases in just thirty minutes. Local churches, charities, and a United Auto Workers chapter delivered shrink-wrapped cases of water out of their offices, where residents lined up in snowy, single-digit weather to receive them.39 One day in January, Absopure Water Corporation sent a semi-truck to downtown Flint. With the help of Flint Strong and a local Realtors association, it handed out about two thousand free cases of water. A resident who was in the queue, a fifty-three-year-old man, told a reporter that he was there because the water in his home smelled like bleach and upset his stomach. “I love Flint, but they’re treating us like dirt,” he said.40
The town’s biggest institutions were also on their own, trying to figure out how to care for their communities. After the TTHM notice, the University of Michigan–Flint, Kettering University, and Mott Community College hired consultants to test their water.41 “Our large student body ranges from teenagers to seniors and includes those with disabilities and other health issues,” a Mott spokesperson explained to the Flint Journal. “While we still believe that city water is safe for the vast majority, it is essential that everyone make an informed decision as to how they should respond.”
One of UM–Flint’s earliest tests showed a new problem. It wasn’t bacteria, or discoloration, or odor, and it wasn’t TTHMs. This time it was lead.
On Friday, February 6, 2015, the university delivered news of “an elevated lead concentration.” Most of the campus water tested as safe, but high lead was found in two fountains in two separate buildings. The university’s email offered an assurance based on a testing loophole, one that is so often abused nationwide it is often misunderstood as a best practice. As the email described it, “after water was flushed/purged through the fixtures,” lead was either undetectable in the samples or they were below the legal threshold for drinking water, “with only one exception.” It was unclear if the water was flushed immediately before collecting a sample—allowing the water to flow for a while before filling a container—or if it was flushed the night before, but either way, it’s a tactic that artificially lowers the lead levels. It makes the water seem safer than it is.
UM–Flint updated its water fixtures and added filters at the two points with high lead.42 It posted signs that read, “Do Not Use/Water Sampling in Progress” in other places and continued to conduct tests.
But on campus and across the city, all these efforts were stopgap solutions. They were certainly no use to people such as LeeAnne Walters. Her children were getting sicker by the day, and she had had enough.