The people in the city of Flint are resilient, and we’ve created our own paths to resolve this problem.
—Claire McClinton (2016)
I.
Though he is barely more than fifty years old, somewhere deep in Marc Edwards there burns the fury of an Old Testament prophet. He is a tall, lanky man—he runs most every day—with brown hair, silver wire-rimmed glasses, and an enviable amount of get-it-done energy. But he carries himself heavily. His temper has become infamous in his field, erupting at the perceived moral failings, hypocrisies, and errors of others.
Edwards grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in western New York when it, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, was a symbol for the emerging environmental movement.1 After decades of bearing the detritus of industry, agricultural pollution, and human sewage, huge swaths of the 9,910-square-mile lake were declared “dead.” When Edwards was five years old, the slick of oils and chemicals on the Cuyahoga River, which empties into Lake Erie, caught fire.2 Dr. Seuss, in his 1971 children’s book The Lorax, imagined a toxic place where “fish walk on their fins and get woefully weary in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
From his tiny town, where children attended a K–12 school housed in a single building, Edwards remembered the foul smell of the lake and the ominous absence of fish. But, as he would tell the story later in life, he also remembered environmental engineers who worked feverishly to clean up the lake, part of a youthful movement that led to reforms that limited water pollution. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were among the biggest triumphs, debuting not long after the nation celebrated the first Earth Day. Lake Erie had a remarkable recovery. Because it is far less deep than the other Great Lakes, it is still a harbinger for environmental woe, but there was enough improvement to inspire two Ohio State University graduate students to write Theodor Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss, in 1985. They invited him to Cleveland to see the renewal for himself and asked him to remove the dig from his book. The author declined the trip, but said, “I do agree with you that my 1971 statement in the Lorax about the condition of Lake Erie needs a bit of revision. I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish.” He made good on his promise to take the line out of future editions.3
When the time came for Marc Edwards to choose a major at the state university in Buffalo, he opted for biophysics. Always a contrarian, he did so, he claimed, “mainly to spite” his sister after she told him it “was the toughest major in the school” and that he “wouldn’t be able to hack it.” It certainly was difficult, almost blindingly so. But Edwards made it through, while working on weekends with intellectually disabled adults to help pay tuition. As he neared graduation, he began to think about what to do next. Should he become a veterinarian? Maybe a medical doctor? He even considered becoming a dolphin trainer, until a dolphin broke his ribs.
As he mulled it over, one of the most significant environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century was playing out just twenty miles from Buffalo. It steered Edwards toward his life’s work.
In the summer of 1978, in Niagara Falls, New York, residents of a neighborhood called Love Canal were making national news by protesting the toxic dump they lived on. Love Canal was designed as a model community near the shores of the Niagara River, which links Lake Erie with Lake Ontario. Love Canal’s memorable name came about when an entrepreneur named William T. Love designed a clay-lined canal that was supposed to branch off the river, bypassing Niagara Falls. But the project was never completed. Instead, the area became a dump site in the 1940s and 1950s for about twenty-one thousand tons of chemicals contained in fifty-five-gallon drums, some of which were already corroding when workers put them in the ground. After covering the mess with dirt, the Hooker Chemical Company sold the site to the Niagara Falls Board of Education. The price: one dollar and a signed waiver that excused the company from all liability. The board knew that the site contained dangerous chemicals, including aniline derivatives and benzene, but Niagara Falls was growing fast, and it was in desperate need of affordable land for a new elementary school—which was built right on top of the dump. Soon the school was surrounded by hundreds of new family homes. None of the homeowners were told about the toxins seeping through the ground beneath them.4
Twenty-some years later, vigorous reporting by a Niagara Gazette reporter shed light on what was already obvious to Love Canal residents. Miscarriages, birth defects, epilepsy, asthma, migraines, and cancer were alarmingly common in the neighborhood. So were dying backyard plants, bad odors, and even, after steady rain, the sight of old drums of toxic waste poking through the earth. One resident, Lois Gibbs, emerged as a particularly powerful leader after her son, a kindergartner, developed epilepsy and a low white blood cell count. Gibbs mapped the health problems; led demonstrations; and, along with her neighbors, called for an evacuation of the entire development. New York State finally intervened after studies by the Environmental Protection Agency and the state’s Health Department confirmed that there were toxic vapors in the Love Canal houses. The elementary school closed. Families were evacuated from 239 homes, which were demolished over the next several decades. About thirty more families in the area adjacent to Love Canal were also temporarily relocated.5 In time, a second school was closed, and President Jimmy Carter declared a federal disaster in Love Canal. It was the first time that a man-made emergency had been designated as such. In 1980, as a result of the community’s frontline activism, the Love Canal evacuation zone was expanded to include up to nine hundred more homes.6 Nowadays, the area has been “landscaped into banality,” according to historian Richard S. Newman—a green field, studded with shrubs that block the monitoring wells, surrounded by weedy old driveways and a chain-link fence.7
The Love Canal movement pushed the nation to reflect on how it should reconcile its industrial past with public health and environmental wisdom. Even Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, America’s number-one bestseller for more than six months in 1981, discussed the crisis at length in a chapter called “The Body Besieged.” (Fonda toured Love Canal with Lois Gibbs in 1979, and she also funded a speaking tour for Gibbs.8) In Washington, the Carter administration developed what became known as the Superfund program to pay for the careful and comprehensive cleanup of toxic waste. It required the EPA to find the parties responsible for hazardous waste and force them to clean up their mess. Failing that, the agency could use Superfund money to clean up a site and then refer polluters to the U.S. Department of Justice to recover costs (and then some). Significantly, polluters were liable even if their dumping had been legal at the time.9 By 1983, the first National Priorities List named 406 hazardous waste sites around the country—Michigan had 41, the second most listings—and it eventually added about 1,200 more. The dross of industry had so saturated the environment that by 1996 the EPA was pouring more than $1 billion a year into the Superfund—about 20 percent of its budget.10
Marc Edwards had found his field. The engineers working to solve the Love Canal disaster were heroes, and he very much wanted to be seen as a hero, too. He eventually found his academic home at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech. A land-grant college in rural Blacksburg, it was founded on the principle of solving real-world problems. Its motto is Ut Prosim, which translates as “That I may serve.”
The lead crisis in Washington, D.C., broke open in January 2004. One morning, residents woke up to an alarming headline in the Washington Post: “Water in D.C. Exceeds EPA Lead Limit.”11 There had been elevated lead in the water for years—residents had discovered it, pooled their tests results together to create a database, mapped it, and tipped off the Post—but this was the start of the explosive public revelations. Edwards had been part of the group looking into the issue. He worked on the case as a subcontractor for the EPA, and, shortly before the story became front-page news, D.C.’s water utility offered him a consulting contract. But by that point, Edwards had become so disgusted by its handling of the water problems that he refused it—he felt as if he would be working for the wrong side.12 Edwards continued on as a volunteer.13
His expertise on lead infrastructure and drinking water turned out to be an asset to residents who were pushing for answers. Once the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its now-infamous report—the one that claimed that no one was harmed by the water, even in homes that had more than 300 parts per billion of lead—Edwards became fixated on refuting it, especially as the report began to be used around the country to justify relaxed standards for drinking water.14 Officials at both the EPA and the CDC disputed his allegations by saying that he was only an engineer, not a public health expert.15
For the galvanized community, the resolution to the D.C. water crisis was slow, iterative, and never wholly satisfying. After the Post began reporting on it, the city’s Health Department launched a massive, albeit piecemeal, campaign to protect people from unsafe water. By 2006, the lead levels had lowered significantly, thanks to adjusted treatment. (Pre-flushing was still used, though, which prompted many to question the test results.)16 There was another uptick when the city began doing partial-line pipe replacements.17 Replacing only part of a service line disrupts the section that remains in the ground. That can cause a spike in lead levels that lasts for months.
Edwards doubled down on researching the catastrophe. Along with other community organizers, he filed endless public records requests over many years to see if the rise in lead levels had, in fact, harmed children.18 It cost his family tens of thousands of dollars in fees, he said, and by his own estimation he gave the crisis about thirty volunteer hours a week. He was met with obstinacy at nearly every step—the CDC and other agencies refused to provide him with information about the community’s blood-lead levels during the years when there was especially high lead in the water. When Edwards sent requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the raw data of the CDC report, he got nothing back, for years. Then the agency sent him a single spreadsheet with a list of anonymized subjects who had been tested—but it didn’t make much sense, because it included people who were tested after the study was published, and only thirteen people who were not drinking bottled or filtered water.
In early 2008, Edwards was finally able to evaluate information from the Children’s National Medical Center. In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology in January 2009, he and his coauthors shredded the conclusions of the CDC’s report. The data proved, as he later described it, “what we’d known actually for two thousand years. Which is, if little kids drink high lead in drinking water, they get lead poisoned. They get hurt.” Hundreds of children—maybe even thousands of them—had been lead-poisoned after being exposed to D.C.’s water during the years of contamination. In the most high-risk area, the number of children with elevated blood-lead levels had more than doubled.19
In 2010, a bipartisan congressional investigation into the D.C. lead-in-water crisis confirmed what Edwards and the frontline community organizers had been arguing for years. Its unequivocal report was titled “A Public Health Tragedy: How Flawed CDC Data and Faulty Assumptions Endangered Children’s Health in the Nation’s Capital.” In 2004, it alleged, while worried residents were demanding answers, the CDC had rushed the report to publication, knowingly using incomplete data to tamp down the public outcry.20 As its senior author wrote in an email to her boss at the time, “Today has been the first day in over a month that there wasn’t a story on lead in water in the Washington Post and also the first that I haven’t been interviewed by at least one news outlet. I guess that means it worked!”21
One of the problems with the rushed report is that it did not mention that many of the residents it observed had long since stopped drinking tap water, so it was dubious to claim that they were evidence of the water’s harmlessness. A large group of children who drank water with very high lead levels were left out of the cross-sectional study. Partial-line replacements were recommended as remedy for the crisis, even though the process is likely to increase the lead content of the water. The congressional report skewered the CDC for not notifying the public about how “most of the conclusions” of its study were totally negated, even by much of the agency’s own research.22
The investigation gave a jolt to the coalition that had been campaigning for safe water.23 Yanna Lambrinidou, a leading organizer who helped bring the new research to the attention of Congress, told a Post reporter that the shameful 2004 report “gave the perpetrators of D.C.’s lead crisis a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” allowing them to escape accountability for their actions for too long.24 Ultimately, the CDC backpedaled, but it never admitted to conscious wrongdoing. It was all a miscommunication. “Looking backward six years,” said the deputy director of the CDC’s national center for environmental health, “it’s clear that this report could have been written a little better.”25
Edwards couldn’t let it go at that. He wanted the agency to admit that it had purposefully minimized the risk of lead in the water, perhaps because the CDC was worried about distracting attention from its long-running campaign against lead paint.26 Regardless, the crisis in the nation’s capital had real-world consequences. Two thirds of more than six thousand tested homes showed lead levels that exceeded the federal limit. Hundreds of children had elevated lead in their blood, which was associated with the water. About $100 million were spent on partial-line replacements until it came to public notice that children living in homes that received one were even more likely to test for high lead levels.27 And in 2014 Edwards published a study that showed a correlation between the lead-contaminated water and a spike in fetal deaths and reduced birth rates.28 There were about twenty to thirty more fetal deaths in the city for each year of the crisis. That was a jump of about 37 percent, even as the comparable numbers in nearby Baltimore were on a long decline. The rate of fetal deaths declined in 2004, when the lead problems became public and people began to take precautions, but they ticked up again during the years when pipes were partially replaced.
The whole episode took a toll on Edwards. Even with the validation that came from his MacArthur grant and the congressional investigation, he was shaken by how difficult the fight had been. There seemed to be enemies everywhere. People in power were working harder to protect themselves and their institutions than to do what was right, he felt, which seemed to him to be an utter betrayal of public trust. “Overall, this was a time of just incredible hopelessness for me,” he said. He was in his forties, but “so naïve” that never in his wildest dreams could he have predicted that the “scientists and engineers paid to protect us, the environmental policemen,” would become “environmental criminals” who hurt innocent people. “It just didn’t make any sense to me at all.”29
Believing that ethics was a crucial part of educating the next generation of scientists and engineers, Edwards teamed up with medical anthropologist Yanna Lambrinidou, the parent who was an influential organizer during D.C.’s lead crisis. They began teaching a path-breaking graduate course at Virginia Tech called “Engineering Ethics and the Public.” It was designed to prepare students, still at the sunny beginning of their careers, to act when—not if—they are faced with a moral dilemma. Uniquely, it emphasized the voices of marginalized communities that were affected by the decisions made by engineers. One of the signature assignments was to role-play the press conference that took place after the Post story broke, featuring representatives from the EPA, the CDC, the D.C. water authority, and other agencies. Armed with the same information those agencies had at the time of the actual conference, students found that they went so far in defending the office they represented, they sometimes invented information on the fly to counter questions they couldn’t answer.30
For all that Edwards, Lambrinidou, and many others had done to expose the D.C. crisis, nothing really changed afterward. No one was formally held accountable, not in a courtroom or anywhere else. Nobody was fired or demoted. There was no remediation, reform, or even any real apology. Even after the CDC finally backed away from the 2004 report, it admitted to being guilty only of bad writing. Meanwhile, water infrastructure across America was underfunded and in terrible condition, and nobody seemed to care. And the loopholes in the Lead and Copper Rule were still there to be exploited when utilities tested their water, in D.C. and in cities all over the country. People were unknowingly put at risk every day.
Edwards burned with a sense of betrayal. What it comes down to, he said, is “what are you loyal to in this world? Are you loyal to your friends, to your employer, or are you going to be loyal to the truth and humankind?” Every scientist and engineer must decide, not once, but throughout their careers.
Which is all to say that Marc Edwards could not have been more ready for LeeAnne Walters’s call from Flint, Michigan.
II.
From the switch to the Flint River to her son’s lead poisoning, LeeAnne Walters brought Edwards up to speed on the water crisis. Edwards knew that the only way to find out what exactly was going on in the water at her home was to test it. Although tests done by the city and the MDEQ had already shown excessive lead, Edwards was all too familiar with how the analysis could be manipulated. It was worth doing the tests again and making sure they were analyzed the proper way.
So in April 2015, following instruction from Edwards, LeeAnne collected thirty samples from her home. The water had been shut off at this point, so it had to be temporarily turned back on, and in this unusual case, since it had been sitting stagnant for weeks, it was necessary to flush the taps at low flow for twenty-five minutes the night before. Over the phone, Edwards talked LeeAnne through the whole process: she didn’t let the water run first, and she collected samples at a variety of flow rates—not the slow trickle that’s often used to lessen the likelihood of lead flaking from the pipes. The bottles were sealed and passed on to the EPA’s Miguel Del Toral, who, while traveling, personally dropped them off more than five hundred miles away, at Edwards’s lab in Dunham Hall at Virginia Tech.31
Within a week, the results were in. The sample with the lowest lead level tested at 300 parts per billion; the highest was more than 13,000 ppb; and the average was 2,000 ppb. The EPA classifies water with 5,000 ppb as toxic waste. Even the low test far exceeded the federal action level. As Edwards relayed to both LeeAnne Walters and Miguel Del Toral, it was the worst lead-in-water contamination that he had seen in more than twenty-five years.
The EPA had been told that Flint’s water was treated with corrosion control, and Del Toral had passed that assurance on to LeeAnne. But the only possible explanation for the state of her water was that it wasn’t. LeeAnne tracked down public documents that suggested as much, and after making more inquiries Del Toral confirmed their suspicions.32 Pat Cook, a drinking water official with the MDEQ, told him that Flint hadn’t had corrosion control since “the disconnection from Detroit.” As Del Toral wrote in an email, this “is very concerning given the amount of lead service lines in the city.”33
In the meantime, the city began to install a new copper service line to LeeAnne’s house. Del Toral seized the opportunity to examine the old line, confirming that it was made of lead. Downstream, he also retrieved a sample of galvanized iron pipe that had become coated with lead. Lead corrosion had flowed through it and stuck to the sides; if rust crumbled into the water, the lead would come with it.34
It was increasingly obvious that the MDEQ’s pat voice mail attributing the Walterses’ problem to indoor plumbing was wrong. The surge of lead had to be coming from outside—and that lead service line was the likely culprit. Since similar lines threaded through all of Flint, and since the contamination in the water at this house had hit hazardous waste levels, any rational person would wonder about the safety of the entire city’s water. Perhaps most damning of all for the MDEQ’s initial assessment were the results of tests done in May, after the new copper line was installed. The samples showed a dramatic improvement in the water. (The water heater still had high lead though, likely because it was still housing particulates from the old line.)
Elsewhere in Flint, tests were suggestive but spotty. A city test showed high lead at a house a few doors down from the Walters family. A mile away, another test found levels that were almost twice that. But at least two of LeeAnne’s neighbors did not have high lead (which is why the family had been advised to rely on the garden-hose connection).35
Altogether, though, there was enough evidence for Del Toral to feel that it was time to issue an alert. He synthesized the saga in an eight-page report titled “High Lead Levels in Flint, Michigan.” It was confirmation of the contamination in the Browning Avenue household and an indictment of the overall management of the water the city had been drinking for more than a year. The report also documented Flint’s problems with E. coli and TTHMs.36 Setting aside the MDEQ’s contradictory claims about corrosion control, Del Toral bluntly stated that after the switch from Detroit, Flint did not continue to treat the water in a way that would mitigate the lead and copper levels. It was both against the law and a threat to public safety.
Additionally, Del Toral’s report explained that the city’s water tests were unreliable. “The practice of pre-flushing … has been shown to result in the minimization of lead levels in the drinking water,” he wrote. “Although this practice is not specifically prohibited by the LCR, it negates the intent of the rule to collect compliance samples under ‘worst case’ conditions, which is necessary for statistical validity given the small number of samples collected.” Del Toral noted that the MDEQ supported the practice of pre-flushing. But Flint was now flirting with a public health emergency. He urged the EPA to intervene by reviewing the suspect sampling and the lack of corrosion control.
The report was addressed to Tom Poy, head of the groundwater and drinking water branch of the EPA in Chicago. Seven others were copied on it, including four MDEQ officials: Liane Shekter-Smith, head of the drinking water division; Pat Cook, the community drinking water specialist; and the ever-present Stephen Busch and Mike Prsyby. Two EPA water experts were also listed as recipients, as was Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards. When Poy followed up by asking why Del Toral was so certain that the lead problem was widespread, given the narrow set of tests, he was told that it was basic chemistry. “We don’t need to drop a bowling ball off every building in every town to know that it will fall to the ground in all of these places,” Del Toral wrote in an email. The only reason there wasn’t more data beyond LeeAnne Walters’s house was because “the City of Flint is flushing away the evidence before measuring for it.”37
Then he got even more pointed: “I understand that this is not a comfortable situation, but the State is complicit in this and the public has a right to know what they are doing because it is their children that are being harmed. At a MINIMUM, the City should be warning residents about the high lead, not hiding it telling them that there is no lead in the water. To me that borders on criminal neglect.”
When an employee writes a report like this, the EPA has a protocol. Its conclusion needs to be checked and rechecked before the agency signs off and releases a final version. Del Toral’s dispatch was thus considered an interim draft. But he couldn’t shake his worry about a looming disaster. Time was precious. If his analysis was correct, the corrosion of Flint’s pipes was worsening every day, causing more lead to saturate the water and more exposure to a dangerous neurotoxin.
That’s why he had sent copies to the people at the MDEQ who were directly involved with Flint’s water. And when LeeAnne Walters asked for a copy, he gave her one, too. She in turn shared the report with a journalist she trusted. The Flint water crisis, a local worry for more than a year, was about to move into the spotlight.
III.
Curt Guyette is tall and lean, with hooded eyes and gray-threaded brown hair that he’d tied back in a low ponytail for years but later cut short. He has a resounding laugh and an easy manner that belies the ferocity of his approach to mission-driven journalism—a mixture of skepticism of people in power, disdain for hypocrisy, and kinship with underdogs.38
Guyette’s was a familiar byline at the Metro Times, a Detroit alt-weekly that was distributed in Flint. For eighteen years, he turned out features about emergency management (“It’s Good to Be the King”), medical marijuana (“Cutting Through the Smoke”), and industrial pollution (“The Big Stink”). His pieces tended to be long, sardonic, and wonky, backed up with original reporting, punctured by colorful quotes, and displaying an unvarnished leftist point of view. Sometimes he wrote chatty interviews with people he simply found interesting: comedians, artists, kiteboarders, superfans of the Detroit Tigers. He once hiked the entire U-shaped span of Detroit’s Outer Drive, all forty-four miles of it, and produced a two-part series about his adventures. “I wonder what its bizarre and beautiful existence means to Detroit, if anything,” he wrote about the road. “I wonder what seeing it all by foot will mean to me.”
But his tenure at the alt-weekly came to an abrupt end when new ownership fired him in 2013 for revealing the contents of a company press release to another journalist a few minutes before the news was posted online. Soon after, Guyette signed on as an investigative reporter with the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the only branch in the country to have a journalist on staff.39 Guyette was the test case in a pilot program supported by a Ford Foundation grant, and he had a mandate to cover shifts in democratic governance under emergency management. He began work at an opportune moment: Detroit was just a few months into its municipal bankruptcy, and Flint was preparing to switch its water supply, both tremendous changes that were steered by emergency managers.
Guyette’s stories had fairly wide latitude to stake out his beat. His articles were published on the ACLU’s Michigan website, and occasionally in other local outlets, including the Michigan Citizen and, ironically, the Metro Times, which had yet another new owner and appeared to regret the loss of one of its best-known bylines. In winking self-acknowledgment, it named Guyette the “Best Journalist Who Worked at Metro Times” in one of its “Best of Detroit” issues.
Guyette’s reporting about emergency management led him to Flint and, inevitably, to the water wars. He was by no means the only reporter covering the story. Even in a region with a news infrastructure that had been devastated by layoffs, buyouts, and closures, beat reporters and local television stations followed the day-by-day developments. Even the New York Times had caught wind of the trouble. It published a feature that focused on Melissa Mays, a music promoter in her thirties who had become a prominent presence at water protests and public meetings.40 Like LeeAnne Walters, she said that she and her family had struggled with skin rashes and other ailments since the water switch. Her hair was falling out in clumps and lightening from brown to a brassy shade. After the boil-water advisories, the Mays family—Melissa, her husband, their three sons, and their pet cat and fish—used only bottled water. It cost them hundreds of dollars a month.
The article was featured on the home page of the Times website. But for all the media coverage, the story of the water crisis was stuck. Journalistically, it kept repeating itself. First came a disturbing news item about Flint’s water. Then came assurances from experts who said that it was fine and that treatment would improve. This in turn was followed by resident testimonials, demonstrations, and independent investigations that disputed the official claims. Then the cycle started all over again. It kept coming back to the fact that Flint residents were saying one thing about the water, and city and state authorities were saying another. It didn’t help that Michigan had some of the worst transparency laws in the country. Residents and reporters might have been able to help break the information stalemate by filing open records requests for internal details about Flint’s water switch, but they were limited by the fact that Michigan is one of only two states where both the governor’s office and the legislature were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Over at the ACLU, Guyette got together with Kate Levy, a local documentarian, to make a short film called Hard to Swallow: Toxic Water under a Toxic System in Flint. It was a six-minute recap of the water troubles that focused on the role of emergency managers. Resident activists were at the center of the story, including retired autoworker Claire McClinton, from the Democracy Defense League. “We knew that this emergency manager law was undemocratic,” McClinton said in the film. “We knew it was unprecedented. But we never dreamed that we would be faced with not being able to use our municipal water.” The film also included Melissa Mays, who said that she and her neighbors had heard for years about the pollution in the Flint River. When there was talk of using it as the community’s new source of drinking water, “we all thought it was a joke,” she said. And the Reverend Alfred Harris of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action testified that over at his Saints of God Church on West Pierson Road, they no longer conducted baptisms. “If we baptize, we go outside of the city of Flint.”
Emergency manager Darnell Earley made an appearance as he argued his case at a town meeting. “The work that has gone into preparing the City of Flint to eliminate its dependence” on the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, “that’s a major step, a huge step in the right direction, because that now gives you the opportunity to … better control the costs.” But residents were exasperated when water bills continued to get more expensive. Melissa Mays expressed alarm at how this would affect residents who couldn’t afford to pay them. “There’s no relief for your bills, you’re going to get shut off, and then everybody knows: you lose your water for ninety days, they cap your sewer, condemn your home, take your children.”
LeeAnne Walters spoke to the filmmakers as well. From her stoop, the stay-at-home mother precisely explained the problem: the change to a more corrosive water source, without adequate treatment, caused the protective coating in the city’s pipes to break down. This led to her son’s diagnosis. She showed his medical report on camera: “The LEAD level is abnormally high.”
Hard to Swallow was released on YouTube and the Michigan ACLU’s website on June 25, one day after Miguel Del Toral had delivered his report. It proved to be a fortunate coincidence. The film strengthened Walters’s confidence in Guyette. And so she gave him a copy of Del Toral’s briefing.41 For the first time, a reporter was armed with hard data about the lead toxicity of Flint’s water, data that contradicted the MDEQ’s numbers.
With Del Toral’s analysis in hand, Guyette contacted city and state officials to get their side of the story. But his affiliation with the ACLU, an advocacy organization, prompted skepticism about how seriously to take him. An email between city employees discussing his interview request described Guyette’s role in Hard to Swallow, saying that it “somewhat discredits his objectivity.”
Another email from an MDEQ public information officer to Brad Wurfel, the communications director, had the same concern. “I got a weird call from a ‘reporter’ at the ACLU asking about Flint drinking water,” she wrote, adding that she felt almost positive that “it’s the same guy who used to work at Metro Times.” Guyette told her that he had a source at the EPA who said that “we use a ‘flawed methodology’ to collect our samples,” which led to lead levels being seriously underestimated. “Apparently the EPA and Virginia Tech sampled a house using a different methodology and found 13,000 ppb of lead.”42
Guyette followed up the next afternoon. “ACLU guy is back today,” the information officer wrote as she forwarded his email to Wurfel. But Guyette was not the only one being snubbed. Mayor Dayne Walling also inquired about the report after hearing from Guyette, and he asked the EPA’s Chicago office if he could get a copy of it. Susan Hedman, the head of the office, didn’t send it to him. Instead, she told him that the report was a “preliminary draft” that “should not have been released outside the agency” until after it had been “revised and fully vetted by EPA management.” That would take months.43
The MDEQ never did get back to Guyette, not even to say “no comment.” Despite the lack of cooperation, Guyette wrote a long story that ran on the ACLU’s website on Thursday, July 9. It linked to a full copy of the report and included an interview with Del Toral, whom he described as a “whistleblower,” although he wasn’t that, since he hadn’t reached out to a journalist himself or otherwise released his report to a public audience. And he had been purposefully transparent about his investigation all along, copying his EPA superiors at every step. Guyette’s article was packaged with a short video titled Corrosive Impact: Leaded Water and One Flint Family’s Leaded Nightmare.
In the leafy college town of Ann Arbor, at the headquarters of Michigan Radio, someone was watching.
It wasn’t long ago that Michigan Radio, the state’s leading public radio service, primarily broadcast classical music.44 In 2007, there were about five people on staff who gathered news. By the time Del Toral wrote his report, there were more than twice that, including reporters, digital producers, and on-air hosts. This upward swing was rare in journalism, but the station’s annual operating budget had also grown, in part due to rising listener support. Its programming reached about 450,000 listeners each week via transmitters in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Flint.
Michigan Radio had filed dispatches about Flint’s water—the switch from Detroit, the affordability crisis, the boil-water advisories and TTHMs, even features about, for example, an art installation that one resident made from plastic water bottles.45 The station was well situated to take the story further. But when reporters and producers read the report that Guyette published, they had a hard time believing it. “There was a disagreement in the newsroom,” the news director, Vincent Duffy, recalled. “Some wanted to get it out right away, and others in the newsroom were saying, ‘These numbers can’t be right. This can’t actually be happening that the lead levels are this high in a municipal water system.’ Turned out that actually was the case.”
On July 9, the same day the ACLU story ran, Michigan Radio’s Lindsey Smith reached out to the MDEQ. Brad Wurfel alerted a number of officials, including Stephen Busch, about her inquiry.
“Steve, I just got a call from [Michigan] Public Radio about an EPA notice to Flint about elevated lead levels in the water,” Wurfel wrote. “Apparently, you were cc’d on EPA’s note. Can you give me a call ASAP.”
“This is what Curt Guyette had been calling about, by the way,” wrote the public information officer a minute later. “Apparently it’s going to be a thing now.”
There was apparently some confusion about Del Toral’s report—not everybody at the MDEQ had seen it or realized that it had already been sent to four agency officials. The public radio reporter ended up emailing Wurfel a link to the ACLU site, which he in turn forwarded to his colleagues: “Miguel apparently asserts that the DEQ and EPA are at odds on proper protocol. Which seems weird. Let’s discuss!”
Stephen Busch replied to the thread. “Obviously we are not going to comment on an interim draft report,” he wrote.
But Brad Wurfel did do an interview with Lindsey Smith, discussing Flint’s water issues in a more general way. The segment was broadcast on Michigan Radio on Monday, July 13. It opened with a comment from Wurfel that would become infamous: “Let me start here—anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax.”46
In light of the state’s tests of nearly 170 homes in Flint, Wurfel said, the numbers at LeeAnne Walters’s home were outliers. “It does not look like there is any broad problem with the water supply freeing up lead as it goes to homes,” he said. He also told the statewide audience that anyone living in a house that was more than thirty years old should get their water tested, no matter what city they lived in.
But just as Wurfel was reassuring Michigan Radio listeners about the water, other people at his agency were noticing that the latest numbers were worrisome. Those 170-some tests cited by Wurfel were from the routine twice-a-year checks that are required by the Lead and Copper Rule. One hundred tests had been done in Flint at the end of 2014. The next batch was due by June 30, 2015. As the deadline neared, Adam Rosenthal, an MDEQ water expert, had emailed Mike Prysby and Stephen Busch: “We hope you have 61 more lead/copper samples collected and sent to the lab” and that they “will be below the AL [action level] for lead. As of now, with 39 results, Flint’s … over the AL for lead.” If the result held, it would trigger a series of requirements, including public notification and active steps to reduce the lead.
After a lot of last-minute scrambling, the MDEQ allowed the city to drop the number of samples from one hundred to sixty on the grounds that Flint’s population had slipped to fewer than one hundred thousand people.47 The city turned in a total of seventy-one. As usual, collectors had been instructed to pre-flush the water. They also sidestepped the EPA guideline to focus on high-risk locations—that is, homes that are likely to be serviced by lead lines, where contamination would be expected to be more severe. Flint couldn’t easily find those homes even if it wanted to, since the records on the location of lead pipes were kept on decaying maps and spotty index cards.48 But after Rosenthal sent his warning, nearly one quarter of the final tests were done at a stretch of road where a major part of the water main had been replaced some years earlier. When mains are updated, lead pipes, if they are there, are often removed, too.49 In Flint, these samples recorded very little lead.50 Finally, the rules require that homes tested in the first batch in 2014 be retested in the second round to make it easier to spot changes in the water quality. Yet only thirteen homes were retested—and all of these had scored low lead levels the first time around.51
Despite all that, Flint still exceeded the federal limit on lead, according to a report dated July 28. Even by the state’s own numbers, Wurfel’s claims on Michigan Radio didn’t hold up. The water wasn’t safe after all. The state would have to work with the city on a major notification campaign, advising residents on how to protect themselves.
But then the MDEQ did a curious thing. It supervised a revision of the results, with two of the seventy-one samples—both with extremely high lead—dropped from the calculation. One of them came from LeeAnne Walters’s home. Scrapping those tests brought the city’s lead level down to 11 ppb. That’s high, but within acceptable limits. When these revised results were made official, Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, added a handwritten note, “Two samples were removed from list for not meeting sample criteria.”52
LeeAnne Walters had been giving these public reports her close attention, and she noticed that her sample was excised. She wanted to know why. The MDEQ explained that she had a filter, which altered the water’s quality and invalidated the sample. (In fact, Walters had been told to remove the filter before the test, and she had done so.) The second sample was disqualified because it didn’t come from a single-family residence. Being stringent about the Lead and Copper Rule only when it lowered the lead count, while exploiting loopholes at every other turn, made the water seem perfectly compliant with the law.
As Flint endured an unseasonably hot summer, and media attention became sharper, Mayor Dayne Walling went on local television to calm the rising panic. He said that he and his family still drank the city water, and he encouraged others to do the same.53 He took a sip of it from a mug, live and on air, calmly telling the news anchor, “It’s your standard tap water.”
Meanwhile, the EPA’s Chicago office was fielding complaints about Del Toral’s report. Aggrieved staffers in the MDEQ protested that they had “obtained a copy from an outside [ACLU] website.” At least one of those complaints came from someone who had in fact been copied directly. The EPA’s repeated defense was that Del Toral’s report was the product of his own research; it hadn’t been reviewed or approved by the EPA. By releasing it outside the agency, he essentially acted outside his authority. The EPA did urge the MDEQ to tell Flint to get going with a corrosion control program (the state agency still disputed its necessity), but it had a generous timeline to implement it. So long, in fact, that Flint probably wouldn’t complete the program before it switched to lake water from the KWA.
By now, Miguel Del Toral was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t doing interviews, he wasn’t included on email threads about Flint, and he didn’t appear to join any interagency conference calls. When LeeAnne Walters went to Lansing with a group of organizers, she was told by the MDEQ that the report was flawed and that “Miguel had been handled.” There, it seemed, his work in Flint would end.54
“When I heard that, I grew quite concerned,” Marc Edwards recalled. “It wasn’t just smoke here, there was fire.”55