Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!/It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
—Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency” (1957)
I.
What do you do when a city is in a crisis? How do you fix a decades-old, slow-burn emergency? By the time of Flint’s water switch, the city’s problems were so deep-rooted and familiar that just about anyone in the state could have rattled them off (and so could people well beyond Michigan, thanks to storytellers such as native son Michael Moore). For local leaders like BB Nolden, the water issues seemed like one more thing on a long list of worries. Everything was urgent; in a strange way that made nothing urgent. This might explain the sluggish response of people who could have looked closer, sooner, at Flint’s water: public servants, journalists, environmental organizations, academics, medical professionals. But the water crisis was not just one more thing. Not only was the risk mortal, it was shaped from the start by the unusual political context of the city. Under emergency management, Flint didn’t have the power to make decisions for itself.
The story went back to 2011, Election Day, a downright balmy November afternoon. It reached 63 degrees in Flint at one point. Not bad at all for door knocking in the neighborhoods. Mayor Dayne Walling was running for his first full term in office, after having won a special midterm election two years earlier, and he was taking nothing for granted. He drove his dark silver 2006 Chevy Impala—GM-made, naturally—through town, going house by house and encouraging people to vote before the polls closed. Later, as was his tradition, he would end Election Day at his own polling location.
But plans changed when Walling’s cell phone rang. It was minutes before three in the afternoon. He had just parked the Impala outside Neithercut Elementary School on the city’s southwest side, and as he lumbered out of the car with the phone pressed against his ear, he found himself talking to Andy Dillon, Michigan’s state treasurer. It was a brief conversation. Dillon informed Walling that in two hours, just in time for the evening newscasts, the governor would announce that Flint was a fiscal disaster. The state was appointing an emergency manager to take charge. This was the ninth time that a Michigan city had come under emergency management.1 Flint now accounted for two of those nine times.
“I was just completely stunned that an emergency manager was being appointed without any substantial consultation with me about next steps,” Walling remembered. That the announcement came on Election Day “immediately led me to believe that a strange political calculus was behind that.”2
With about $25.7 million in accumulated deficits, Flint was designated by a unanimous state panel as being in a “local government financial emergency.”3 The questionable handling of Flint’s water and sewer funds got a special mention; in years past, money had been transferred out of them to fill cash shortages in the city’s general operations. To replace the depleted funds, water and sewer rates spiked under Mayor Walling. Three of the panel’s members had Flint connections: a former state senator who represented the area; a local businessman; and a onetime city administrator: Darnell Earley. Given the emergency designation, which Walling did not dispute, the panel had a choice of options to recommend. One was to reach a consent agreement for the state and city to tackle the difficulties cooperatively. Walling had expected this and was ready with a few proposals for such an agreement. But the panel claimed that local officials had not moved “with a degree of urgency and vigor commensurate with the seriousness of the existing financial emergency.”4 And so, five hours before the polls closed on the day that Flint reelected Dayne Walling with 56 percent of the vote, he learned that he was campaigning for an empty post, one that had been scrubbed of substance.
Walling’s shock that afternoon muted his memory of all that was said, which he regrets. But as far as he could recall, Andy Dillon gave him a phone number, saying he should use it if he needed to reach the Michigan State Police. “I couldn’t figure out if he thought there was a personal protection issue, or if people would start rioting,” Walling said.5 “Here I had, out of love for my city and motivation to tackle these difficult issues, moved home with my young family … and taken on personal and campaign debt, had finally won an election.… I probably knew more about government than a lot of state officials combined. I’m out busting my ass, walking the streets of Flint, asking people to support me to be mayor, and the governor’s going to sit back in his office, and … dial in an emergency manager who’s going to show up and become the mayor and the council. It was just so fundamentally wrong.”
Emergency management is supposed to be an extreme measure to meet extreme need. Eighteen states have a mechanism for the state to oversee local matters in distressed cities.6 In the 1970s, a state financial control board maneuvered New York City through its near-bankruptcy. New Jersey was the first to put a school district under its oversight (Jersey City, 1989), and it since did the same for the cities of Camden, Paterson, Trenton, Harrison, Asbury Park, Atlantic City, and Newark.7 Pennsylvania intervened in dozens of its struggling cities; Pittsburgh’s finances were under state control for about fourteen years, beginning in 2004.8 Congress created a mechanism for the fiscal oversight of Washington, D.C., and the person appointed to the job, Anthony Williams, was so successful and popular, he ended up being elected mayor in 1999. (Dayne Walling worked in Williams’s administration.) Connecticut created its bipartisan Municipal Accountability Review Board in 2017, whereby cities such as Hartford could apply for different levels of state involvement, which came with an infusion of funding to meet basic needs.9
In Michigan, the legislature first created a statute in 1988 to assign an “emergency financial manager” in Hamtramck, a small, diverse, independent town within Detroit’s borders. Two years later, the statute was expanded so that emergency managers could be deployed to any seriously troubled municipality or public school district. The policy was designed for cities and schools to escape bankruptcy, which destroys credit ratings, while tapping some of its advantages, such as the ability to restructure debt.10 The measure was used sparingly—only three cities were placed under emergency management over its first decade or so. But in 2002, it came to Flint for the first time. The governor appointed Ed Kurtz, a local resident and the president of Baker College, as the first emergency manager. (He’d show up again in the same role about a decade later.) Kurtz vowed to take no salary. The city then had 125,000 people, 8.3 percent unemployment, a deficit growing close to $30 million, and the dubious distinction of being the largest community in the state to get an intervention. Michigan’s treasurer at the time explained to the New York Times that Flint needed an emergency manager because it had failed to deal with the reality of its declining tax base. “Why do you have to have the state come in and tell you that you have a problem?” he told the reporter. “If we don’t act now, when do we act?”11
Kurtz’s authority was intermittent at first, as the City Council challenged the takeover in court. But by the end of the first year, he had implemented new code enforcement measures for buildings and homes, cut the pay for the mayor and council members, and eliminated the health, dental, and vision benefits for most city officials.12 (Two years later, he reinstated some of the pay.) Flint’s retirement board, facing Kurtz’s threat to replace its members, approved proposals to reduce contributions to the pension system. Kurtz temporarily shuttered recreation centers, closed the ombudsman’s office, and worked with the largest union to agree to a 4 percent pay cut. He also approved more than $1 million for sewer and road improvements and raised water bills by 11 percent. After almost two years, Kurtz recommended ending the emergency. But by then “there wasn’t much left,” Jim Ananich said. A schoolteacher and the son of a city ombudsman, the future state senator was elected to Flint’s council just after Kurtz left. “We’re rebuilding. The finances were in better shape, but there was nothing there.”
In the spring of 2011, Michigan broadened its emergency management system. Public Act 4, signed by Governor Rick Snyder, became one of the most expansive laws of its kind. It gave the governor’s office the ability to appoint an emergency manager who, for the first time, could reject, modify, or terminate contracts and union agreements—steps that are typically possible only if a city is in Chapter 9 bankruptcy.13 It also lowered the threshold for what would warrant state intervention in the first place. And local governments were expected to pay the salaries of their state-appointed managers.
Even in its new guise, Michigan’s emergency manager law remained focused on finances. “That’s the problem.” The goal is “to balance the books, and if you can try to get something else done, I guess you can try that. But that’s not what you go there for. And then the state’s idea is to get out as soon as possible,” said Michael Stampfler, a former emergency manager for the City of Pontiac.14 It was a short-term strategy for long-term problems. Emergency managers might make real improvements by cutting costs, but they are not necessarily ones that endure. Perhaps the strongest evidence of the mismatch between the problems and the solution is the fact that, despite being approved by the state as the best leader for the job, and with extraordinary powers to act, EMs tend to cycle in and out of the same communities.
Against the argument that this mechanism interrupts the democratic process, supporters of emergency management point out that residents are as much citizens of the state as they are of their city. The governor is an elected leader with jurisdiction over the distressed community. And anyway, emergency management can’t be an encroachment on local sovereignty when the state created that sovereignty in the first place. If the state empowered its cities, then it has the authority to disempower them, or even unincorporate them.15 Also, there is always an effort to choose an EM with local connections, such as Ed Kurtz and Darnell Earley. And—facts are facts—oftentimes EMs have interrupted cycles of corruption in local leadership, including a bribery scandal in the suburb of Ecorse. By the time emergency manager Joyce Parker ended her tenure there, Ecorse had eliminated $14.6 million in debt and had its first positive general fund balance in six years.16 Parker then became the emergency manager for Allen Park, another inner-ring suburb. It was struggling with debt following a bad movie studio deal that eventually led to fraud charges against a former mayor and city administrator. In a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, they were barred from any future municipal bond deals, and the mayor faced a $10,000 civil penalty. Parker, meanwhile, exited her role as EM after two years, leaving Allen Park with a projected fund balance of $3.6 million.
And besides, these cities are in an emergency. It must be named as such. The state would be remiss to let them unravel without even trying to intervene. Emergency management could be described as a late-coming corrective to the state’s apathy over decades of urban distress. Through the EM system, the state is finally admitting that there is a problem in its cities, and it has both the responsibility and the power to do something about it.
However, emergency management in Michigan, and the disenfranchisement that followed, had unmistakable racial overtones. The communities affected were nearly always majority black, including Flint. By 2017, 52 percent of Michigan’s black residents and 16 percent of Latinos had lived in cities governed by unelected authorities. Only 2 percent of white people had the same experience, although there were many other impoverished communities in Michigan that were majority white.17 To put it another way, if you lived in Michigan, there was a 10 percent chance that you lived under emergency management at some point between 2009 and 2016. If you were black, that possibility jumped to 50 percent.18 The statistics reflected the urban decay resulting from institutionalized segregation, just as the Kerner Commission had foretold half a century earlier.
Under the Voting Rights Act, communities of color that have historically been disenfranchised are supposed to be protected from “a broad array of dilution schemes” that could minimize the power of their votes.19 Among those schemes, the law explicitly includes the tactic of turning elected posts into appointed ones. But Michigan circumvented that by instituting an appointed post that superseded the elected position.20 The upshot: white and black voters had different experiences of democracy. It didn’t really matter whether that was the intention of the law’s architects; the results were the same. The appearance of different rules of law for different groups of people bred disillusionment and distrust that extended far beyond the term of any single emergency manager, even if he or she was exceptionally talented and well meaning. Yet another echo of the Kerner Commission’s findings in the 1960s.21
It was too much. Activists were determined to repeal Public Act 4. They gathered enough signatures to get it on the ballot, and in November 2012 voters rejected the expanded emergency management law.22 The count was close, but certain: seventy-five of Michigan’s eighty-three counties voted to take Public Act 4 off the books.
But the reprieve was brief. Six weeks later, a lame-duck legislature passed a nearly identical version of Public Act 4 and Snyder signed it. The simulacrum, Public Act 436, had some tweaks that gave local officials a somewhat bigger role. It newly required that the state, rather than municipalities or school districts, had to pay the salaries of emergency managers. But the scope of their powers remained the same. Significantly, the new law came with funds attached, which made it impossible to eliminate through another statewide referendum.
The rush to reinstitutionalize the expanded powers of emergency managers was probably tied to Michigan’s plans for its largest city, Detroit. Three months after Public Act 436 was signed, a lawyer from Washington, D.C., was chosen as Detroit’s emergency manager. A University of Michigan graduate who had helped Chrysler navigate its brush with insolvency, Kevyn Orr, steered the Motor City through an impossibly complex municipal bankruptcy.
Detroit’s bankruptcy was resolved with an $816 million “grand bargain,” an unlikely deal that involved philanthropic and corporate donations to spare the Detroit Institute of Arts from being pillaged by creditors and to soften pension cuts (which still suffered harsh losses).23 More than $7 billion in Detroit’s unsecured debt was wiped out, making it possible for the city to reinvest in public services. But Detroit was an unusual case. Rather than recruiting the most talented leader possible to serve as emergency manager, more common is for modestly accomplished administrators—they need only five years of business or government experience—to be shuffled from one distressed city and school district to another.24
And state oversight can go on, it seems, indefinitely. Officially, a city council can vote the EM out of office after eighteen months with a two-thirds majority.25 But the state gets around that term limit (imposed by its own law) with a neat trick—the emergency manager resigns before the term expires. A new one is appointed and the clock starts over. Thus Detroit’s public schools were under the control of the state for eight years, and the city of Flint for three and a half years. When the last emergency manager departed Flint in April 2015, the city’s $19.1 million deficit had been eliminated (thanks in part to a last-minute $7 million state loan). But the city had endured debilitating cuts and was in the midst of a life-threatening water crisis. In his exit letter, Jerry Ambrose didn’t address the water quality, but he acknowledged that the aging infrastructure and sky-high rates were “another factor impeding the City’s ability to attract and retain businesses and residents. There needs to be a concerted effort to reduce rates by as much as 50%, but that cannot even be contemplated without the commitment of financial assistance from the state and federal governments.” Though Flint was a founding member of the KWA, “it will not be sufficient to lower water costs.”26 Also, the Office of the Ombudsman, formed decades earlier as a watchdog against mismanagement and corruption in local government, had been eliminated by emergency managers. In a parting order, Ambrose, specifically forbid the city from funding it again, or revising any changes made by an EM until it had been out of receivership for at least a year. (It wouldn’t be until April 2018 that the governor announced Flint’s exit from that form of state oversight.)
What unfolded in Flint revealed not only the limits of austerity, but also the fatal flaw in Michigan’s experiment with expansive emergency management: there is no transparency or accountability when things go wrong.
II.
Flint might have suffered a democracy deficit, but its people found other ways of showing up for their community. The city’s culture of organizing had been passed down through the generations. The United Auto Workers began their historic sit-down strike in Flint. Frustrated with stunted wages, dangerous conditions, and the company’s efforts to intimidate them from forming a union, workers occupied two auto plants on December 30, 1936. Refusing to leave or work, they staged concerts and lectures, while supporters delivered food and picketed outside. The strike spread to a third plant in February. With workers staying inside, it was impossible for the company to hire replacements and get the lines moving again. GM tried turning off the heat to freeze the strikers out, but they remained, burning burlap to stay warm. It took forty-four days, but GM eventually announced a $25 million wage increase and recognition of the union’s right to organize—a first for America’s auto industry.27 It changed lives. Unpaid overtime was banned, wages were fairer, and dangerous environmental conditions were improved, including poor ventilation in the paint department. A few decades later, citizens banded together against segregation and racial discrimination in real estate with the sleep-in on the lawn of city hall, a rally that drew thousands, and a first-of-its-kind fair housing vote. And in the twenty-first century, when emergency management came to Flint, residents founded groups such as the Democracy Defense League to challenge it.
So it was no surprise that when they knew the water switch had gone poorly, the people of Flint got organized. Besides protests, petitions, and public meetings, they kept meticulous notes, collected samples, hosted makeshift water distribution sites, created social media pages to share information, and sought public documents. The volunteer staff of East Village Magazine, one of the oldest community media outlets in the country, tracked the story in each monthly issue. Residents also enlisted environmental justice experts from around the country for their insight on the crisis. At wateryoufightingfor.com, a website set up by Melissa Mays and her collaborators, they shared research and advice from the leader of the Love Canal movement.28
In the spring of 2015, a number of groups banded together as the Coalition for Clean Water to better coordinate their activism. They met in the basement of the Reverend Alfred Harris’s Saints of God Church. When LeeAnne Walters and other families learned the disturbing results of their lead tests, the coalition made sure to reach four thousand homes, distributing information about the dangers of contamination. And in March, after emergency manager Jerry Ambrose overruled the City Council’s vote to get Flint off the river water as soon as possible, the coalition sought an injunction to force the city to act (an effort that died in the courtroom). The activists also repeatedly made the hour-long drive to Lansing to make their case to the governor’s aides and the MDEQ. They invited Governor Snyder to visit Flint—the invitation was declined. In July, the Flint community partnered with activists in Detroit who were facing escalating water shutoffs in their own city. Together they led the Detroit to Flint Water Justice Journey, a seventy-mile march that told the intersecting stories of each city. In short, the organizers did everything they could think of to make their plight—their city—visible.
Despite the activism, the journalism, and the independent monitoring, the state didn’t budge from its position. The MDEQ kept pointing to its test results of 169 water samples, which, it claimed, were proof that there was nothing to worry about. On its side, the community had the samples from LeeAnne Walters’s home that had been analyzed by Virginia Tech, plus a smattering from other residents who had requested free tests from the city. The community argued that Flint wasn’t just facing a lead problem; there had been a pattern of contamination, including E. coli and TTHM violations. And they had Miguel Del Toral’s damning memo, too. But the state said the earlier contamination issues had been resolved, Del Toral’s boss had backed away from his memo, and Flint would be back on Lake Huron water soon enough. The plan, it seemed, was to run out the clock.
The only thing to do was to double down and collect more and better data. Curt Guyette, who saw that the rising media interest hadn’t done much to change the state’s response, had access to grant money at the ACLU that could be used to pay for expert research. He broached an idea to Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech. What about doing an independent test of the water in Flint? Like the analysis done at LeeAnne Walters’s house, but this time spanning the whole city? Edwards liked the idea. It would work, though, only if there were enough volunteers to conduct this massive experiment in a short time. And it would need to be done with the strictest rigor so that the test could withstand all scrutiny—to make it “bulletproof,” as Guyette said: “we knew they would come after us.”29 It would take fifty samples for a scientifically valid test. One hundred samples would be better. Each test cost about $70.
Guyette contacted the Coalition for Clean Water. Could its people collect a hundred water samples from all across Flint—and quickly? No problem. As Guyette remembers it, an energized Rev. Harris said that he and his fellow pastors could do it themselves.30 Guyette then turned to the ACLU: the grant money would need to run to $7,000, at least. But Edwards landed on another option—an emergency stipend from the National Science Foundation. These are usually given in the wake of extreme disasters, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, oil spills, and earthquakes, but Edwards’s research team argued for a rapid response to a looming public health catastrophe in Flint. As they wrote in their application, what was happening in the city was “occurring at some level in many other financially stressed U.S. urban centers with decaying drinking water infrastructure.”31 An independent citywide test could “help inform the current policy debate regarding strategies for dealing with cities that have gone bankrupt, as well as the discussion of access to safe and affordable drinking water as a basic human right.”32 Guyette liked this idea better: unlike the ACLU, the foundation was “not an activist organization,” he said. “They’re pure science.”33 It would be harder for critics to dismiss the citizen-led study as biased.
To staff his side of the team, Edwards recruited a raft of undergraduates, grad students, and postdoc research assistants for a meeting, using free pizza as bait. Many of them had taken the engineering ethics class taught by Yanna Lambrinidou and himself, and the students could see the link between what had happened in Washington, D.C., and what was happening in Flint. About thirty students formed what became the Flint Water Study group.
By August, their test was well under way. The students at Virginia Tech distributed three hundred sampling kits to the organizers in Flint, conducted tests at businesses and homes while visiting the city, and planned tests in Detroit to compare the different water systems.
The sampling kits sent to the coalition were packaged in brown cardboard boxes, each containing three plastic bottles of different sizes, and a set of instructions. All the items in each box were marked with an identifying number to keep them organized.
Grad student William Rhoads hosted an instructional video on YouTube that showed the coalition how to collect samples.34 After filling the largest bottle with one full liter, they needed to pause for precisely forty-five seconds before filling the second bottle. Another two-minute break, and then they needed to fill the last and smallest bottle. This test could be done only after the taps had been turned off for at least six hours—that’s a requirement from the Lead and Copper Rule, though, unlike the instruction LeeAnne Walters received, there was no cap on how long the water had been stagnant.35 (The longer it’s stagnant, the more likely that lead will show up.) There was also no pre-flushing in the Virginia Tech tests, compared to the official rules that said that the tap should run for “at least 5 minutes” before sampling.36 All three bottles had to be filled from the cold tap at high flow (which is when lead is most likely to flake into the water), with the tap remaining open as the collectors filled each sample. By collecting multiple samples from the same tap, there could be more confidence in the results, since lead release can be erratic. These bottles also had wide mouths, like mayonnaise jars, while the city tests used narrow mouths, which meant the bottle was probably filled at a low flow to keep the water from splattering and was thus less likely to pull lead out of the plumbing. The Lead and Copper Rule doesn’t specify what bottles to use. Small-mouth bottles were another opportunity to minimize the lead levels.
Each bottle had to be capped, sealed in a plastic bag, and returned to the cardboard box with the information sheet that identified the source of the water. At that point, the coalition implemented a system to make the samples as tamperproof as possible to answer critics who would surely accuse them of skewing the test results (by deliberately adding lead to the water, for example). When they were later scrutinized, the system proved its worth.37 Before each cardboard box was sealed, residents would initial near the seam of the flaps. The package was then taped in front of them so that the initials were under the tape.38 If somebody tried to open the package after it was sealed, the inked initials would peel off. After this, the box went to a collection point in Flint and from there to Blacksburg, Virginia.
The undertaking was a formidable one, involving a simple but exacting process that needed to be replicated again and again. Samples were needed from across the breadth of the city to give a comprehensive picture of Flint’s water. Residents had to be able to trust the organizers who knocked on their doors. This is where Flint’s genius for community organizing shined. Volunteers first learned the process and then passed on their training to their neighbors. They broke down the city by zip codes as they coordinated deliveries and pickups. “You know, scientifically, we couldn’t have done it any better ourselves,” Edwards said. “They implemented training procedures that I think the city and EPA should be using around the country.”39
Guyette joined the coalition organizers as they knocked on doors. “I was really walking a line in my own role as a journalist and activist,” he recalled. “I’m not just observing the story. I’m participating in it. In my mind, I’m just trying to get to the truth.” And he was not canvassing the streets just to get a story that nailed the authorities. If the testing found that the water was genuinely safe to drink, “we’d do a story on that and put people’s minds at ease,” he said, because at that point, “there was so much worry and confusion, it’d still be of value.”40
None of this happened in secret. Edwards notified the MDEQ and the Flint treatment plant about the study.41 The citizen scientists and Virginia Tech students were perfectly visible as they roved the streets. Guyette posted ongoing reports online, as did the local news outlets. Edwards and other team members published updates on FlintWaterStudy.org, a new blog that was similar to a watchdog site kept by D.C. organizers in the aftermath of that city’s lead crisis.42
They also posted simple but dramatic experiments on the blog. To illustrate the Flint River’s corrosiveness, for example, the team collected Flint water in two clean glass containers. A piece of iron was placed in one of them, and the team measured the levels of chlorine disinfectant in the water as time went on. In the container that held only water, chlorine levels stayed fairly steady. But in the one with the piece of iron, the chlorine nearly vanished after twelve hours. The problem was that the water’s level of chlorides—the same compound that the GM engine plant blamed for corroding its machinery—was so high that it made the iron break down. The free-floating iron then swallowed up the chlorine disinfectant, probably to a level that was below the minimum required for drinking water. And the longer the test ran, the less chlorine there was. That suggested that people in Flint who lived in high vacancy areas, where water ran through the pipes more slowly, were more likely to drink water that was dangerous.
In a little over two weeks, the coalition distributed all 300 of the lead-sampling kits to Flint residents and collected back 277—an astonishing rate of return, and substantially more than the city’s own collection over the past year.43 The grant application had assumed it would get only 100 kits returned, or one third of the total. But that didn’t account for the coalition’s determination. “I bet you’d crawl over broken glass just to get one more kit,” Guyette told LeeAnne Walters.44 He was joking, but she responded with the utmost seriousness: “Yes.”
III.
Analysis of the kits showed that the poison was spread across the entire city. The study confirmed what should have been obvious: when corrosive water moves through lead pipes and plumbing, and it isn’t treated with corrosion control, a lot of lead ends up in the water. That’s especially true if the pipes are old, leaky, oversized, and cross long stretches of vacant land.
In Flint, using the usual federal formula, the water samples had 26.79 parts per billion of lead in them, well over the federal action level and nearly three times the safety standard of the World Health Organization (10 ppb). All ages, all income levels, and all ethnicities were affected by contaminated water, but not evenly. While lead pipes were installed all over the metropolitan region—they had been standard issue for decades—some neighborhoods had worse water than others. The highest tested sample came in at 1051 ppb, and in a couple of hard-hit zip codes, one in five homes had high lead. In keeping with the pattern of inequality built into the region, it could be presumed that commuters were also exposed to the toxic water, but far less than the people living in the city.
The samples and the distribution system were also tested for chlorine. Sure enough, there was very little chlorine in Flint’s water, even though it had been added as a disinfectant at the treatment plant. Just as the Virginia Tech experiment had shown, the iron that turned the water brown also consumed the chlorine.45
This is how the Coalition for Clean Water and the Flint Water Study group showed that the series of problems with Flint’s water were connected. Since the switch from Detroit, rapidly corroding iron negated the chlorine treatment. Without the disinfectant, the water was vulnerable to bacteria growth. The first of the E. coli bacteria violations had come a few months after the switch. To combat it, more chlorine was added to the water. But this likely contributed to the spike in TTHMs, the disinfectant by-product that forms in reaction to organic matter. (Organic matter is also more plentiful in the river water, especially when it’s not properly filtered.) As the corrosion worsened, lead leached into the water right along with the iron.46 The excess iron also turned out to be a perfect nutrient for the growth of other types of bacteria—deadly and, for the time being, undetected.
Nobody should be drinking this water. The Flint Water Study team in Blacksburg wrote to each home with the results of their sample. They also called the residents one by one. One of the graduate students, Siddhartha Roy, found that no one was particularly surprised to hear about high levels of lead. But the calls were still agonizing. Roy managed to get through only six before he had to stop. “I was done,” he said. “I was too depressed.”47