The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
—Jean Rostand, as quoted by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
I.
LeeAnne Walters couldn’t figure out where the rashes were coming from. Her whole family had them, but on different parts of their bodies. Her husband, a naval reservist named Dennis, had rashes on the sides of his stomach and inner thighs. Kaylie, her oldest, had them between her fingers and toes and under her breasts. JD, her fourteen-year-old son, had them on his chin, the backs of his legs, and under his arms. They were on LeeAnne’s chin as well, and on her upper chest, and also behind her knees. And the three-year-old twins, Gavin and Garrett, were streaked with red on their hands, feet, and buttocks. While some of the rashes were scaly, itchy, and burning, others were raised bumps. Either way, they seemed to be getting worse. There were various diagnoses from the pediatrician—scabies, perhaps, or contact dermatitis, or maybe eczema. But when the family celebrated Kaylie’s high school graduation in August 2014 with a pool party at their home on Browning Avenue, everybody who emerged from the water had angry red blotches on their skin.1
The hair loss started in the fall. Kaylie lost clumps of her long brown hair. The hairdresser whom LeeAnne had been seeing for years noticed thin patches and asked if she was sick. LeeAnne’s eyelashes fell out. They never quite grew back right, so, feeling self-conscious, she began to wear fake ones.2 Meanwhile, the twins complained of aches and pains. The two little ones had developed in tandem their whole lives, but now Gavin, who had a compromised immune system, slowed down. He stopped gaining weight and sometimes seemed unable to pronounce words that his mother was sure he knew.3 Then, around Thanksgiving, JD complained of abdominal pain so severe that he struggled to walk. He missed school and ended up in the hospital. JD’s father lived on the west side of the state, near the Lake Michigan shore, and JD was supposed to visit him over the Christmas break, but since he’d been so sick, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not this was a good idea. “We just didn’t understand what was happening,” LeeAnne remembered.4 JD did end up going to see his father. As it happened, when he went out of town, his symptoms vanished.
LeeAnne didn’t see connections among all these strange ailments until just after Christmas, when brown water spurted out of her tap. Not long after that, the TTHM notice arrived in her mailbox. And their whole-house water filter, which typically needed a new cartridge every six months, now filled so rapidly with particulates, it first needed a change every two to three weeks, and then every six to fourteen days. LeeAnne wanted to be a good mom—she encouraged her kids to drink water rather than juice or soda—but the tap now seemed like a threat. The family sought relief from their refrigerator filter, but then they stopped drinking water from their house altogether. LeeAnne also instituted a five-minute shower rule.5
In January 2015, she, Dennis, and Kaylie all went to the meeting at the city hall dome, bringing along plastic bottles of discolored water collected just one day earlier at their kitchen sink, each marked with the date and time. At the end of the rowdy gathering, as people were filing out of the room, LeeAnne and Kaylie worked their way to the front and showed the brown water to emergency manager Jerry Ambrose, holding the bottles by their fingertips, as if the contents were something gruesome.
That’s not your water, she remembers Ambrose telling her. He didn’t take the samples or inspect them closely. Nor did Mike Prysby of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, whom LeeAnne remembers standing in the small knot of people around them, shaking his head. She didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that she was a liar, and she and Ambrose got into a heated conversation. After the meeting, nobody followed up about the water at her house. It wasn’t until February, after LeeAnne got a doctor’s note about her son’s compromised immune system, and how badly he seemed to be reacting to the water, that she was bumped to the top of a waiting list for the city to come to carry out a test.
Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, came over on the morning of Wednesday, February 11. He inspected the plumbing in the kitchen, basement, and bathroom. He observed the sediment accumulating in the toilet, and, after removing the house filter, he collected samples of the water. About a week later, he delivered the results to LeeAnne. The iron levels were so high, they exceeded the limits of the testing instruments. It was the iron that had turned her water dark. And it prompted Glasgow to recommend a second test, this time for lead and copper. LeeAnne methodically followed the written instructions, which said that before she collected a sample, her water needed to sit stagnant for six to eight hours and be pre-flushed.
Not long after she submitted this new sample to the city, she got a frantic voice-mail message. Sounding very upset, Glasgow told her not to let anyone drink the water at her house, and specifically not to use it to make juice for her children. LeeAnne called back immediately after hearing the message, but it was after business hours; she couldn’t get ahold of anyone at the Water Department. But the next morning, she was at his office. Glasgow walked her through the two-page lab report, marked with the logo of the MDEQ. Drinking water is expected to meet the standards of the national Lead and Copper Rule, which sets the federal action level at 15 parts of lead per billion parts of water (15 ppb). The lead levels in LeeAnne’s water were about seven times higher than that—104 ppb. Glasgow told her that he “had never seen a number that high for lead.”
What LeeAnne did next would change the course of the Flint water crisis. Going above the MDEQ to the EPA’s District 5 office in Chicago, she reached a soft-spoken regulations manager in its drinking water division named Miguel Del Toral. He connected her with Marc Edwards, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech. Edwards had received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007 for his work on drinking water safety and deteriorating infrastructure. The citation highlighted his involvement in exposing a lead-in-water crisis in Washington, D.C., though Edwards remained aggrieved that his efforts had not won reparations for those who had absorbed toxic lead for years, not even an apology.
The alliance of these three would make a citizen scientist out of LeeAnne Walters and a detective out of Miguel Del Toral. For Marc Edwards, it was an opportunity to grasp at some kind of redemption.
II.
The old alchemists believed lead could be spun into gold. It was one of the base metals that men fiddled with for generations in fire-lit rooms, using the techniques of chemistry to transmute the elements of the earth. Back then, there was scarcely a difference between wizardry and science. Sir Isaac Newton, the force behind modern physics and calculus, was an alchemist, though he practiced it illegally and under fanciful pseudonyms, such as Jehovah Sanctus Unus, or Jehovah the Holy One.6 For about three decades, he copied recipes in his notebook for the mythical philosopher’s stone that was believed to be the key to curing ill health and transmuting metals. He riddled his language to keep the recipes secret by, for example, giving earthly elements the names of the gods. Iron became Mars, gold became Sol, and lead became Saturn, the ringed planet then believed to be at the farthest edge of the solar system. But for all the experimentation, lead persistently stayed lead.
Alchemists weren’t the only ones who wished lead to be something it was not. A natural element found in the earth’s crust, the bluish-gray metal isn’t hard to extract from rocks. It often comes alongside lustrous silver, which was being mined anyway, so it was natural to look for ways to use it. Lead is soft enough to scratch with a fingernail, but it’s dense and stable. It’s malleable, durable, abundant, and far less vulnerable to oxidation than iron.7 Lead pipes are flexible enough to bend through an underground landscape of tree roots and cellars, but sturdy enough to last a long time—two qualities that made lead popular in drinking water systems. Mixed with paint, lead gives a boost to the color, helping it to shine and stick. As part of a gasoline formula, it makes the engine run smoothly. But unlike some metals, such as copper and zinc, lead has zero health benefits. Indeed, it is toxic to humans, even to the point of death.
Because we found almost infinite uses for lead, we are exposed to it in an astonishing number of ways. Lead particles can be inhaled or ingested. People breathe in leaded dust, for example, in buildings where the paint is deteriorating or where disruptive repairs or rehab work is being done. It also comes through the drinking water that streams through lead pipes and plumbing fixtures, and it flakes off pretty ceramic dishes that are glazed with lead. People draw lead into their lungs when they inhale the exhaust of leaded gasoline, or while working in jobs where lead is handled, such as recycling, smelting, mining, or making stained glass and lead-acid batteries. Lead has been widely used for ammunition and fishing tackle.8 Through certain lipsticks, eyeliners, and dyes, lead is painted onto our skin and hair.9 Infants consume it by drinking baby formula made with contaminated water, or by sucking pacifiers coated with a thin fur of lead dust. A child might lick fingers or toys dirtied with leaded soil, or suck a sweet-tasting paint chip that peeled off a wall.
Children are most vulnerable to lead poisoning because their developing bodies absorb up to five times more lead than an adult from the same amount of exposure. Undernourished children who do not receive enough mineral nutrients absorb even more than that. Once in the bloodstream, lead disrupts the normal operation of a child’s cells, particularly the way that they produce energy and communicate to the nervous system.10 Lead accumulates in the teeth, bones, and soft tissues—the same places that collect calcium—which means that small, sustained exposures can build up to a severe amount of lead in the body.11 This can cause brain swelling, fatigue, anemia, vomiting, abdominal pain, irritability, aggressive and antisocial behavior, slowed growth, hearing problems, learning disabilities, diminished IQ, reduced attention spans, kidney failure, seizures, coma, and, in extreme cases, death.12 The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington, estimates that about 494,550 deaths worldwide in 2015 can be attributed to lead exposure, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. It also estimated a loss of more than 9 million life years due to the long-term impact of lead.13
Adults are at risk from exposure, too. Lead can cause anemia, hypertension, joint and muscle pain, memory difficulties, headaches, mood disorders, kidney damage, low sperm counts, abnormal sperm, miscarriages, and stillbirths. During pregnancy, lead that has accumulated in a woman’s bones is released, just like calcium. The calcium helps form the bones of the fetus, but lead can limit its development and cause premature birth.14
None of this is news. Written accounts of lead poisoning were first found on papyrus scrolls from Egypt, which go so far as to describe how the toxicity was sometimes exploited as a murder weapon. In the second century B.C.E., the Greek physician Dioscorides made the connection between lead exposure and its sickening results. “Lead makes the mind give way,” he wrote.15 Pliny the Elder described how lead poisoning was an occupational hazard of shipbuilding; a disproportionate number of workers suffered from the material that surrounded them. In the sixteenth century, the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus investigated “the miner’s disease,” which was his name for an illness that was widespread among workers who inhaled metallic vapors—mercury and lead.16 Bernardino Ramazzini, an Italian doctor in the early 1700s, described potters and tinsmiths who worked with the metal as becoming “paralytic, splenetic, lethargic, cachectic, and toothless, so that one rarely sees a potter whose face is not cadaverous and has the color of lead.”17 Artists who used lead paint—that includes Michelangelo, Francisco Goya, and Vincent van Gogh—were also vulnerable. White lead, otherwise known as lead carbonate, is a pure white color that mixes well with oil and brushes easily on a canvas.18 Ramazzini noticed that of the many painters he knew, “almost all I found unhealthy.… If we search for the cause of the cachectic and colorless appearance of the painters, as well as the melancholy feelings that they are so often the victims of, we should look no further than the harmful nature of the pigments.”19 In a 1786 letter, Benjamin Franklin described the laborers in a London print shop as experiencing something he called “the dangles.” Their wrists and feet drooped strangely.20 An old worker advised Franklin, who was employed there, to stop drying cold cases of lead type by the fire, because “I might lose the Use of my Hands by it, as two of our Companions had nearly done.”21
Fifty years after that, a researcher published a clinical description of lead poisoning in plumbers and white lead manufacturers, dubbing it “plumbism.” (In fact, the words “plumbing” and “plumber” come from plumbum; the Latin name for lead is why it’s represented as “Pb” on the periodic table.) Between 1875 and 1900, there were about 30,000 cases of reported lead poisoning in Utah alone, or about 1,200 per year in a territory that had not yet cracked 278,000 in total population.22 In the early 1900s, women swallowed lead pills to induce abortions.23
But a sort of ideological alchemy set in. Despite being one of the world’s best-known neurotoxins, lead was embraced by fast-developing nations. It was seen as nothing less than the key to their prosperity. Lead was built into the infrastructure of American cities such as Flint, lurking not only in the pipes that carried water, but also in the paint used in houses, businesses, hospitals, jails, train stations, and schools. It became part of the solder and brass fixtures in indoor plumbing, and it powered the automobiles that sped down the highways of a sprawling metro region. And yet no amount of lead exposure is safe. While its effects can be mitigated with good nutrition and health care, there is no known cure.
III.
Charles Kettering was a poor farm boy from Ohio who grew up to become one of the twentieth century’s most imaginative inventors. A lanky, bespectacled man with dark, imploring eyes and protruding ears, he notched an even side part in his thinning hair for as long as he had hair enough to part. Kettering moved to Flint to become the head of research at General Motors, and then served as the company’s vice president from 1920 to 1947. It was an exciting time to be at the company. By the end of the twenties, GM had introduced color and the annual model update to cars, and it had bested Ford as the nation’s top automaker.24 In keeping with the company’s rise, Flint’s population grew by more than 70 percent. Its percentage of African American residents doubled.25
“Ket,” as his friends called him, invented the electric ignition in automobiles, which ended the unhappy era of starting cars with hand cranks. Among the 186 patents in his name, there is also the incubator for premature infants, the electric cash register, the Freon refrigerant that became standard in refrigerators and air conditioners, and the enamels and lacquers that were the first color paints on mass-produced automobiles. He also helped to found the famed Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The cooperative university in Flint once known as the General Motors Institute is today called Kettering University, named in his honor. So is the town of Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton that grew dramatically in the postwar years when Daytonians fled the city for newer communities.
Kettering also helped develop leaded gasoline. It’s made with something called tetraethyl lead, or TEL, and it successfully stopped the obnoxious engine knock that caused trouble for automobiles. Vehicles ran better and at higher speeds. The fuel also burned more efficiently, which conserved petroleum. After many “noxious experiments which filled the laboratories with vile odors,” as Time described it, the first gallon was sold at a Dayton service station in 1923. It was a technological triumph, but through car exhaust, it also put a known toxin into the air. Lead particulates settled into soil, onto waterways, and into lungs. Fumes were especially thick in cities that, like Flint, were both densely built and increasingly reengineered to favor automobiles through widened streets, ample parking lots, and a general dismantling and defunding of public transit systems. Only a year earlier, the League of Nations had recommended the banishment of white-lead paint for indoor use because of health concerns.26
Kettering wanted to avoid using the word “lead” in the commercial market, so the fuel was sold under the brand name Ethyl, eventually through a company that was developed as a partnership of the Dayton lab, DuPont, and Standard Oil.27 But skeptics still slowed the march of progress. In response to queries from the surgeon general about the impact of TEL on public health, a DuPont executive said that while “no actual experimental data has been taken,” the makers felt confident that it was safe. To support their case, the industrialists funded a study that would be conducted by the Bureau of Mines, the federal agency for scientific research at the time. The industrialists demanded—and the bureau largely accepted—extreme control over the results. The contract gave the makers of TEL not only the right to view and comment on the bureau’s analysis, but also the right of final approval.28 As the historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have pointed out, the people who profited from leaded gasoline therefore had “veto power over the research of the United States government.”29
And a lot was riding on this research. Lead was already injuring workers, just as it had injured Paracelsus’s miners, Ramazzini’s artists, and Benjamin Franklin’s print shop colleagues. Five men died while making TEL at a Standard Oil plant in New Jersey in 1924. An additional thirty-five men who were exposed to the “odd gas,” as the New York Times described it, experienced severe neurological symptoms that looked an awful lot like lead poisoning.30 While the company’s executives blamed the workers for, variously, working too hard, not being careful enough, or being physically unfit, the bleak fact was that exposure to TEL left forty of the plant’s forty-nine workers either insane or dead.31
When journalists began to follow the thread on TEL, they found that at least two workers had died at GM’s Dayton plant, along with another sixty who “became seriously ill with frightening symptoms of mania.”32 Four men had died at a DuPont plant in New Jersey, and more than three hundred others were poisoned.33 Workers called the plant “the house of the Butterflies” because so many of them were hallucinating. They batted at the ghostly butterflies that fluttered before them but caught only fistfuls of air.
The distressing reports did little to inspire faith in TEL as a good way to power automobiles. New York City, Philadelphia, and other cities banned the sale of leaded gasoline outright, despite early findings from the Bureau of Mines that declared it to be safe—a conclusion roundly mocked by scientists and labor activists, not least because of the questionable independence of the research.34 An internal memo at GM indicated that the company felt the rising public outrage to be “a deadly threat” to “the survival of the industry.”35
The automaker would have the chance to defend itself when the surgeon general convened a national conference to discuss the future of leaded gasoline—or if it should have any future at all. It was May 1925, and while Ethyl Corporation had voluntarily suspended TEL production, it was prepared to fight for it.36 The fortunes of the nation’s most dominant industries were at stake. What exact amount of risk is acceptable for innovations that build the economy, the culture, and the great cities of America? Was the burden on TEL advocates to prove it harmless or on skeptics to prove it hazardous? How do you even measure the toxicity of lead without purposefully exposing human beings to its potential dangers? And what role do government and private industry have in keeping poisonous materials out of the environment in the first place?37 Maybe they should stop bigfooting around people’s lives, measuring out one persnickety rule after another as if they were spoonfuls of medicine. Maybe risk—and even some unquestionable losses of life and health—was the necessary cost of freedom and growth.
To attack these thorny questions, Charles Kettering brought in a formidable weapon: a thirty-year-old medical school graduate named Robert Kehoe. While on GM’s dime, and alongside other titans of American business, Kehoe spent the next forty years delaying and defeating legislation that would put limits on environmental pollution in the United States. He was the architect of a monumental doubt strategy about lead that would later be mirrored by both the tobacco industry in the face of cancer concerns and fossil fuel companies in the face of climate change.
At the surgeon general’s conference, Kettering opened by telling the story of TEL as a victory against clunky engines.38 He and Kehoe both emphasized its potential to conserve fuel. Leaded gasoline was essential for civilization’s progress, they argued. Any new development came with some new hazards—like automobiles themselves!—and this was no different. TEL was “an apparent gift of God,” according to one of the Ethyl representatives at the table. And all those news reports of ghastly deaths and illnesses were inflated by the fact that workers did not follow instructions for the proper management of the material. As evidence, the industrialists cited ample research, all of which had been conducted on behalf of their own companies. GM vowed to tighten discipline. The minute a laborer showed signs of delirium, he’d be laid off. If he spilled TEL on himself, he’d be fired. That should scare workers into being more careful.
The skeptics made their case as well, but they were at a disadvantage. Epidemiological research—the kind that studies patterns of disease in groups of people—was in its infancy.39 Early public health pioneers were still figuring out how to show, irrefutably, why certain illnesses spread. It is one thing to observe that people who live near a toxic chemical dump are twice as likely to get cancer, for example. It is quite another to prove that one specific person’s cancer was caused by those specific chemicals, as opposed to any other variable or sheer chance. And with lead poisoning in particular, which develops slowly with cumulative exposure, it is difficult to present conclusive proof that lead itself, even in small amounts, is the problem.40
Kehoe and his peers exploited this research gap. They pointed out that not everyone exposed to lead got sick, and that the symptoms of lead poisoning look an awful lot like other diseases.41 Those who were worried about lead’s noxiousness might be spreading hysteria when it could all just be a misdiagnosis. They also shifted blame whenever possible. Kehoe, Kettering, and others insisted not only that laborers who got sick were at fault, but that if a child was poisoned it was probably because its parents were neglectful.
TEL was soon back on the market again, and thriving. And at the surgeon general’s conference, Kehoe had established himself as the go-to national expert on lead. He used not only rhetoric to minimize the seriousness of exposure, but also his own industry-funded research. Kettering opened a lab for him at the University of Cincinnati’s medical campus.42 Any further occupational disasters for those working with TEL would be muted by the dominant narrative that came out of that lab. After conducting a number of tests on young male volunteers who ate leaded salts and sat in rooms filled with leaded exhaust, for example, Kehoe concluded that humans could absorb a certain amount of lead, and that most of what they ingested or inhaled was eliminated naturally.43
Decades later, a pioneering scientist named Clair Patterson would target Kehoe’s research and show that a so-called normal amount of lead in the body wasn’t natural, or harmless. It was simply common.44 It would take a long time for that idea to gain widespread acceptance, not least because its implications were inconvenient. American society had been built around the idea that lead could be alchemized for everyday use.
By 1970, almost 90 percent of all gasoline sold had TEL in it.45 Its production in the United States used more than 100,000 metric tons of lead every year.46 Only four states and ten cities prohibited the indoor use of lead paint, and the number of Americans with lead poisoning was as high as 250,000. Patterson published a paper that showed how the amount of lead in the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere had risen 400 percent from the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750 to 1930. It had grown an additional 350 percent between 1930 and 1965, with the use of leaded gasoline.
Lead was also widely used in the pipes and plumbing for drinking water systems. Some cities, such as Chicago, made it mandatory. It built 385,000 lead service lines into its foundation, more than any other city.47 That means that they were 100 percent pure lead; unlike gasoline or paint, they were undiluted by other materials. Early on, people doubted whether it was wise to use lead in water systems—the Massachusetts State Board of Health urged localities to avoid lead pipes in 1890—but there were no regulations against them. In this pre–Clean Water Act era, even many professionals who were staunch foes of using lead in the built environment did not advocate for legislative involvement in its abatement. Meanwhile, the Lead Industries Association conducted a massive, multipronged campaign to promote the use of lead pipes. For decades, the LIA lobbied with “plumbers’ organizations, local water authorities, architects and federal officials,” according to researcher Richard Rabin, and it published “numerous articles and books that extolled the advantages of lead over other materials.”48
It was a similar story for lead paint, which would become a plague for generations to come. The connection between lead paint and childhood poisoning was first made in 1904. Over the next couple of decades, twelve countries on four continents banned the interior use of such paint.49 But the lead industry worked to defeat a regulatory movement in the United States. The figure of the Dutch Boy painter carrying a pail of white lead was designed to appeal to children. “Lead helps guard your health,” went the tagline in an ad in National Geographic from the National Lead Company.50 But by the mid-1940s even Robert Kehoe acknowledged that “serious mental retardation” was evident “in children that have recovered from lead poisoning,” though he had a much narrower definition of lead poisoning than today’s standard, and he nonetheless continued to offer his assistance to the LIA.51 He and other proponents of lead also still argued that the threat wasn’t as much the material itself as the circumstances of people who were exposed to it.
“The major source of trouble is the flaking of lead paint in the ancient slum dwelling of our older cities, [and] the problem of lead poisoning in children will be with us for as long as there are slums,” the LIA director declared at an annual meeting in 1957, at about the time that city leaders in Flint were planning the big celebration for General Motors’ fiftieth anniversary. The director parroted the point in a letter to Kehoe: “Childhood lead poisoning is essentially a problem of slum dwellings and relatively ignorant parents.” The implication was that if you did not live in a slum, you were safe.52 It’s an idea that still has traction today, but it’s wrong—lead pipes and paint are widespread; the legacy of leaded fuel is scattered everywhere; and to this day it’s difficult to purchase new plumbing fixtures that contain zero lead. However, the argument underscores the fact that certain places—and certain people—bear the worst of cumulative exposure. Old cities have a greater number of homes and buildings with lead paint, and when they are left vacant or when residents can’t afford to maintain them, then that paint is more likely to flake. The lead in the soil is typically more concentrated, too, because of the dense development of the city in the leaded gasoline years. And people who live in places with deteriorating infrastructure are more likely to have lead in their drinking water. Small amounts of exposure from all these different sources build up in the bones.53
The same year the LIA director was talking about slums, Dr. Herb Needleman was treating a three-year-old girl at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. She had more than 60 micrograms per deciliter (µg/L) of lead in her blood, an extraordinary amount. Later research would find neurobehavioral damage in children with less than 5 µg/L. But even by the loose standards of the time, the girl was plainly poisoned. She was on the brink of falling into a coma when Needleman began chelation, a chemical process to extract the lead. Within a few days, the little girl began to brighten and become responsive. Needleman, full of pride and relief, gave the girl’s mother the good news, but he advised her not to return to the same house. He believed that the girl was exposed to lead paint—perhaps it was falling off the walls and ceiling onto her toys, or it flaked off the exterior of the house where she played in the yard. Whatever it was, no amount of cleaning could eliminate it completely. It was best for the girl’s health for the family to move elsewhere. But the young mother said, “Where can I go? The houses I can afford are all the same.” She wrapped up her child and returned home.
The doctor couldn’t write a prescription for this kind of ailment. He couldn’t administer chelation to the whole neighborhood. It was a revelation for Needleman, who would become one of the earliest and most effective anti-lead advocates. “It wasn’t enough to make a diagnosis and prescribe a medication,” he said later. “I’d treated her for lead poisoning, but that was not the disease—the disease was much bigger. The real causes of lead poisoning were in the lives of the people. Her disease was where she lived and why she was allowed to live there.”54
IV.
When LeeAnne Walters reached Miguel Del Toral at the EPA, she told him about Flint, about her family’s health problems, and about her house with the brown water. While the city tinkered with treatment at the plant and scheduled further tests at her house, Del Toral’s office contacted the MDEQ to discuss what was going on.
LeeAnne had complained of black sediment, noted the EPA’s Jennifer Crooks in an email thread that included the MDEQ’s Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby. When the discolored water settled, it left behind oily particulates, which seemed to be accumulating in her toilet tank and plumbing. And then there were the water tests conducted by Flint’s utilities administrator. “WOW!!!,” Crooks wrote. “Did he find LEAD! 104 ppb.… Big worries here.”55 Del Toral believed the black sediment contained an extremely high concentration of lead. Crooks speculated about whether the river water was leaching contaminants out of the pipes. “Miguel is wondering if Flint is feeding phosphates,” she wrote. “Flint must have Optimal Corrosion Control Treatment—is it phosphates?”56
Stephen Busch replied the next day with a false claim: yes, of course Flint had corrosion control. He avoided specifying what kind of treatment it was. And in a voice-mail message, the MDEQ told Del Toral and Crooks that the lead problem at the Walters house was caused by indoor plumbing. The implication was that the contamination affected only a single house, not a whole city, and that the responsibility to fix it fell to the homeowner.
But this made no sense. The plumbing at LeeAnne Walters’s home had been installed in 2011, just after the family bought the house, and it was nearly all made of plastic. Built in 1922, when General Motors was developing segregated neighborhoods in the city, the house on Browning Avenue was in a redlined working-class area. It was now part of a broader south Flint community that battled vacancy, though active neighborhood associations had brought stability to some pockets. Most residents were African American.57
When LeeAnne and her husband moved in, their empty house had no plumbing at all. Probably the metal had been scrapped and sold by needy young men. The Walterses did a full renovation, adding the whole-house filter and new plastic plumbing, which couldn’t possibly be the source of the lead in the water.
A third test from LeeAnne’s kitchen tap didn’t pick up high levels of lead, but a fourth showed levels at 397 ppb. Del Toral decided to check things out for himself. He traveled to Flint and visited the Walters home, where he confirmed that, except for a few minor pieces, all the interior plumbing—pipes, valves, and connectors—was made of plastic and certified for drinking water use. Her faucets also met lead-free requirements. By the time he headed back to Chicago, Del Toral was armed with photographs, some of the iron filters from the home filter system, and an acute sense that something wasn’t adding up.
The water problem at LeeAnne’s house was so bad that, in about the middle of March, the city decided to replace the unusually long service line that connected it to the water main, at no cost to the family. Howard Croft, the public works director, came to her house with a city councilman to discuss it. They wanted her to sign an agreement that would hold the city harmless for any ill effects of the old line, but LeeAnne refused. The replacement proceeded anyway, though slowly. There was other construction work happening outside her house—the kind that can disturb the pipes and cause an uptick in the amount of lead falling into the drinking water. And it wasn’t easy to find where, exactly, the service line was. The city came out numerous times to look.
LeeAnne Walters’s concern about the link between the water and her family’s health wasn’t hypothetical. Her twin boys had been tested for lead before the April 2014 water switch, and the results were considered low. After the water tests at her house, she had them checked again. Gavin’s lead levels had soared to 6.5 micrograms per deciliter, more than three times what it had been before. No amount of lead is healthy or natural, but exceeding 5 µg/L put Gavin’s level in the top percentile for children nationwide. He had been poisoned. As decades of research and observational experience have shown, this can result in permanent neurological and physiological damage. In hopes of determining the source of the lead exposure, his doctor took an X-ray of the boy’s stomach to see if perhaps he’d swallowed paint chips, but they found nothing. Perversely, given the iron content of their water, Gavin was also diagnosed as anemic. He was prescribed iron supplements.58
In April, not long after the family got the results of Gavin’s medical tests, another sample from the house measured the lead at an astonishing 707 ppb. It was so bad that the city shut off the water altogether. The six family members now relied on four garden hoses that were hooked together and connected to their neighbors’ spigot. The winding white snake slipped over their driveway and through a chain-link fence. It was for bare-bones use only—they were told they could shower in it—though in the temperamental early spring, water pressure issues and freezing temperatures sometimes stopped their supply. Then they had to go out into the cold and switch out the hoses.
V.
Thanks to the Clean Air Act in 1970, the new EPA became responsible for regulating lead.59 It first focused on cars. Over the next decade, as part of a complete phaseout, the first low-lead and unleaded gasoline became available in the United States. The EPA also backed catalytic converters for newly made automobiles—any model that had one could use only unleaded fuel. But a total ban on leaded fuel didn’t go into effect until 1996, more than seventy years after the surgeon general had convened a meeting to discuss its risks.60
A nationwide ban on lead paint in housing went into effect in 1978. The use of new lead pipes was eliminated with an amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1986.61 Five years later, the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) set the first national limits for lead and copper in municipal drinking water. The rule’s threshold—15 parts per billion—is fairly arbitrary and not based on any standard of health.62 As a technical benchmark, it struck a tricky balance: the goal for lead in water was zero, but no action was required until tests showed 15 ppb or more in a certain percentage of homes.63
The new policies restricting lead in paint, water, and gasoline were a coup for public health. But they didn’t reckon with the lead that was already around us. Before its phaseout, leaded gasoline accounted for about 90 percent of airborne lead. It settled on lawns, waterways, and even the icecaps, and it didn’t just vanish with the signing of a law. About 3 million tons of lead was painted onto walls, toys, and furniture between 1910 and 1977.64 To this day, any house built before the ban that hasn’t been remediated likely has lead paint in it. For any structure built before 1986, there’s a decent chance that lead pipes connect it to the water main. There is also probably lead solder and brass in the indoor plumbing. Newer structures aren’t immune, either. In the original law, lead-free pipes were defined as containing no more than 8 percent lead. It wasn’t until 2014 that Congress reset the limit to 0.25 percent for pipes and plumbing fixtures, and slightly less for solder.65 Many anti-lead advocates insist that it should be zero.
There are no reliable numbers on how many lead service lines are in use in the United States. The best estimates range between 3.3 million and 10 million, but either way, it’s clear that millions of people drink water out of them every day. And unlike paint or gasoline, water is essential for every living being. Along with regular screenings, the Lead and Copper Rule attempts to manage the risk by requiring water systems serving more than fifty thousand people to use corrosion control, which helps reduce the amount of metals that leach into the water. Besides protecting public health, it’s also cost effective. Every dollar spent on corrosion control saves ten by extending the life of the pipes and lessening maintenance costs.
Corrosion control is essential, but it’s not a permanent or failproof solution. Treatment can fail when lead lines are disrupted by street work, plumbing repairs, or changes to the water chemistry. Washington, D.C., is one place that implemented corrosion control but still found itself with a major crisis. In 2000, the city switched disinfectants. It began treating water with chloramine instead of chlorine, which authorities believed would improve the quality by reducing the amount of by-products in the water. (It was also much less expensive.)66 But the new disinfectant was a disaster for the pipes and plumbing fixtures. Chloramine quickened the corrosion, causing an infusion of lead into the water. Instead of informing the public, the authorities buried the news. Residents were unknowingly exposed to water with significantly higher lead levels for at least three years.67
Thanks to the organizing of a broad coalition of community members and reporting by the Washington Post, the lead contamination became public news in 2004. That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that claimed no one had been harmed by the high lead levels. The study was influential enough to be used by communities around the country to justify why they, too, failed to act urgently when lead showed up in their water. Why would they if no less an authority than the CDC, the nation’s leading institute of public health, said that lead in drinking water didn’t hurt anyone?
The allowance of some lead under the LCR was the EPA’s way of acknowledging that without adequate funding to rebuild America’s massive lead-based infrastructure, not to mention all the plumbing fixtures in individual homes, there was simply no way to eliminate it completely from drinking water. Only a colossal investment, thoughtfully executed, would make zero tolerance possible. The EPA estimated that it would cost up to $80 billion to replace all of the nation’s lead service lines, while the American Water Works Association calculated it at about $30 billion—or $1 trillion, if we repaired and expanded our old water mains, too.68
This never became a priority. Not yet, at least. In the meanwhile, some communities tried to address the lead problem on their own, mostly focusing on paint. But in places such as Flint, where was the money for upgrades supposed to come from? Federal and state funding for such programs declined, and the resources that did make it to local communities were rarely spent on preventive solutions. It was no coincidence that eight of the ten cities with the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning, as determined by the CDC in 2003, were shrinking cities: Cleveland, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Providence, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore. (The others were Chicago and New York City.)69
To make matters worse, poor people—who tended to be concentrated in older cities—also had less access to health care to help manage the harm done by cumulative exposure. The cycle of deprivation affected African American communities most of all. Between 1999 and 2004, black children across the country were 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead than white children, and nearly three times more likely to have very high blood-lead levels.
No one—not taxpayers, not school districts, not the state, and not the federal government—wanted to pay to fix an expensive infrastructure problem. Therefore, many preferred not to know if the children in their communities were drinking lead in their water. There was no onus to act if there was no proof. It was a twenty-first-century adaptation of the strategy of doubt and denial pioneered by Charles Kettering, Robert Kehoe, and their fellow industrialists.
Despite the particular vulnerability of children, there was no federal mandate for schools and child-care centers to test for lead in their water. Forty-four states did not require it either. Part of the problem was that if testing were mandatory, what would happen when lead was found, as it was in about half the public schools in Newark in 2016?70 Do you install all-new pipes, fountains, and faucets, and, if so, who should pay for it? Do you shut off the school’s water and ask the community to donate bottled water? When Camden, New Jersey, found high levels of lead in the water at its schools—New Jersey is one of six states that do require testing—the fountains were turned off. The district went on to spend about $100,000 a year to supply the schools with water coolers.71
The Washington Post investigation that helped uncover the D.C. lead story also revealed how testing was manipulated all over the nation, in both poor and wealthy cities: Boston, Seattle, New York City, Portland, Oregon, and, as it would turn out, in Flint, Michigan.72 The Lead and Copper Rule relies on utilities to self-monitor their water, and it quickly became common for them to exploit the loopholes in the LCR by, for example, pre-flushing the taps before collecting a sample, drawing water at a slow flow rather than a fast one, and disproportionately testing in places where officials believe there are no lead pipes. All these tactics make the amounts of metals in the water appear to be lower than they really are, helping the utility to get a passing grade under the law. Call it modern-day wizardry. However, even with this rule skirting, about 18 million Americans got their water from sources that had lead violations in the previous twelve months, according to a 2016 report from National Resources Defense Council.73
Lead persistently stays lead. Just as it accumulates in the bones of people, it accumulates in the infrastructural bones of cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Flint. Today, about half a million children have a dangerous amount of lead in their blood.74 But lead poisoning has never catalyzed a movement the way that polio, for example, did. “In the 1950s, fewer than sixty thousand new cases of polio per year created a near panic among American parents and a national mobilization of vaccination campaigns that virtually wiped out the disease within a decade,” write Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner in their book Lead Wars. “At no point in the past hundred years has there been a similar national mobilization over lead despite its ubiquity and the havoc it can wreak.”75 Perhaps it is because both the contaminant and the health effects are invisible.76
Only a few major cities have replaced all their aging lead-laced service lines. Those that have—such as Madison, Wisconsin, and, just fifty miles west of Flint, the state capital of Lansing—have created a promising blueprint for how communities can act before an emergency happens. But, for now, they have few peers.