The Poisoned City

CHAPTER 1: THE WELL

. Video of this ceremony was captured by the local television station WNEM, a CBS affiliate that broadcasts to the Flint, Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City areas; and by Dominic Adams, “Watch Mayor Dayne Walling, EM Darnell Earley Drink Flint River Water Before Turning Detroit Connection,” MLive—Flint Journal, April 25, 2014, updated December 28, 2016. See also Dominic Adams, “Closing the Valve on History: Flint Cuts Water Flow from Detroit After Nearly 50 Years, MLive—Flint Journal, April 25, 2014, updated January 17, 2015.
. To clarify the confusing chronology of emergency management as it affected Flint, here is a timeline:

1990: After a couple of experiments in state oversight over troubled local governments, Michigan passes Public Act 72, which allows the state to appoint an emergency financial manager over distressed schools and cities. The authority of EFMs is generally limited to budget matters. The system was rarely used.

June 2002–June 2004: Ed Kurtz serves as emergency financial manager to Flint.

2011: One of the first bills signed into law by Governor Rick Snyder is Public Act 4. It beefs up Michigan’s emergency management system and lowers the threshold for which a community can be declared in need of an EM.

December 2011–August 2012: Michael Brown serves as emergency manager to Flint. It’s the first appointment under the new state law.

August 2012–July 2013: Ed Kurtz serves again as emergency manager in Flint.

August 2012: Public Act 4, Michigan’s expanded emergency management law, is suspended pending a statewide voter referendum. The EM system reverts to the original model.

November 2012: Michigan voters overturn Public Act 4.

December 2012: The Michigan legislature passes Public Act 436, and Governor Snyder signs it into law. It is nearly identical to Public Act 4, but it has appropriations attached, which makes it immune from a referendum.

March 2013: Public Act 436 goes into effect. In the same month, an EM is appointed to Detroit who will lead the city through bankruptcy.

July 2013–October 2013: Michael Brown serves again as emergency manager to Flint.

October 2013–January 2015: Darnell Earley serves as emergency manager to Flint.

January 2015–April 2015: Jerry Ambrose, who was the finance director under Earley, serves as emergency manager to Flint. At the end of his tenure, the fiscal disaster in Flint is declared over. The city still has a $7 million deficit, but that’s resolved with an emergency loan from the state.
. That was in the Great Storm of 1913. Additional ships were lost during the same storm in Lake Superior, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario, and thirty more were “driven ashore, crippled or destroyed.” At least 250 people were killed, most of them in Lake Huron. Richard Wagenmaker and Greg Mann, “The ‘White Hurricane’ Storm of November 1913: A Numerical Model Retrospective,” Detroit: National Weather Service.
. The information on water rates is detailed in a later chapter and its notes. For Flint’s poverty level: “QuickFacts: Flint City, Michigan; United States,” U.S. Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/flintcitymichigan/PST045216, last accessed March 3, 2018.
. Dayne Walling, interview with the author, Flint, Mich., June 22, 2017.
. A curious fact about the office of the drain commissioner is that in Michigan it’s an elective position, and the only one in the state that can single-handedly levy taxes and borrow money. Wright’s argument about the DWSD and the KWA is made at length in his written testimony before the Michigan Civil Rights Commission: “The Flint Water Crisis, DWSD, and GLWA: Monopoly, Price Gouging, Corruption, and the Poisoning of a City,” November 22, 2016, https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/Wright_Monopoly_Price_Gouging_Corruption_and_the_Poisoning_of_a_City_552247_7.pdf.
. The word “Karegnondi” is used to label Lake Huron on a 1656 map by French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, created for the king of France. It’s not wholly clear where he got this name. The founders of the Karegnondi Water Authority cite it as an early moniker for the lake by the Petun Indians, a tribe in modern-day Ontario that morphed into the Wyandot tribe. But either way, the name began to show up on later maps as well. See also Ron Fonger, “Genesee, Oakland Counties Adopt Historic Name for Water Group,” MLive—Flint Journal, May 3, 2007.
. Stephanie Parkinson, “Flint Makes the Switch to Use River for Drinking Water,” NBC 25 News, April 17, 2014.
. “The City of Flint is currently in a year to year contract with the City of Detroit for the purchase of water. A study was conducted that projects that staying with Detroit will cost the region $2.1 billion over the next 25 years. In contrast, if the region builds its own pipeline, the project costs are $1.9 billion over the same period. After the initial 25 year period, the project costs would be less than 25% of the projected water costs from Detroit” (Resolution to Purchase Capacity from Karegnondi Water Authority, EM Submission No. 2013EMO41, adopted March 29, 2013). It’s worth noting that there were a number of commissioned reports that came to different conclusions about whether the KWA would be the most cost-efficient option for Flint. State treasurer Andy Dillon requested a report from Tucker, Young, Jackson, Tull, which delivered its preliminary findings on December 21, 2012, and a full report in February 2013. Tucker, Young said that Flint’s best option was to stick with the DWSD, but to purchase less and blend it with water from the Flint River. Even better, the report suggested, Flint could connect to a different portion of the Detroit system—which would relieve it of the expensive burden of maintaining its treatment plant. Upon receiving the preliminary findings, emergency manager Ed Kurtz asked Rowe Engineering to review them. On January 7, 2013, Rowe declared the KWA was best for Flint. Neither Rowe nor Tucker, Young was a purely independent entity. The latter has worked for the DWSD and Rowe was hired by the KWA to work on its pipeline. For good summations of all this: Lindsey Smith, “Reporter’s Notebook: Some State Officials Still in Denial or Misinformed over Flint River Decision,” Michigan Radio, December 17, 2015; and Paul Egan, “Flint Water Mystery: How Was the Decision Made?,” Detroit Free Press, November 21, 2015, updated November 22, 2015.
. The email with the subject line “Updated Status on GCDC/KWA” was sent by John C. O’Malia to Liane Shekter-Smith and Karen Teeples, both of the MDEQ, on January 5, 2012. It had a memorandum attached that was dated January 3, 2012, which included this excerpt.
. Bryant Nolden, interview with the author, Flint, Mich., June 7, 2016. Nolden and others have said that the council members did not have access to the report from Tucker, Young that was commissioned by the state, which questioned whether the KWA would be Flint’s most cost-effective option. Video of the council meeting is available online: “Flint City Council March 25, 2013,” Spectacle TV; YouTube Video [3.29.45], March 28, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3gbZ8hZ_KI.
. “Jeff Wright Statement on Flint City Council Approving Resolution to Join KWA,” press release, Genesee County Drain Commissioner’s Office, March 26, 2013.
. The DWSD would soon escalate its program of shutoffs for residential customers that it believed had unpaid bills (though it didn’t do the same for commercial customers with hefty unpaid bills). It faced many of the same infrastructural challenges in Flint—enormous system, declining ratepayers—which led to average monthly bills in Detroit that were nearly twice the U.S. average. Details about this have appeared in earlier articles and op-eds by the author. (For example: “Going Without Water in Detroit,” New York Times, July 4, 2014; “Living Without Water in Detroit,” Next City, July 3, 2014.)
. About some of these upgrades: Dominic Adams, “Flint Spends $4 Million on Water Plant in Last Eight Months,”MLive—Flint Journal, January 4, 2014; Ron Fonger, “Former Flint EM: ‘My Job Did Not Include Ensuring Safe Drinking Water,’” MLive—Flint Journal, May 2, 2017; Ron Fonger, “Water Consultant Says Former Flint EM Wouldn’t Pay to Fully Soften River Water,” MLive—Flint Journal, January 11, 2018; Nancy Kaffer, “Why Didn’t Flint Treat Its Water? An Answer, at Last,” Detroit Free Press, March 30, 2016, updated March 31, 2016.
. At the time of this writing, Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam (LAN), the firm contracted to oversee the switch, faces a civil lawsuit for negligence. In 2011, LAN estimated that it would take $69 million to upgrade the plant. Rowe estimated more than $61 million. By 2013, both Rowe and LAN had significantly lowered their estimates: $25 million and $33 million to $34 million, respectively. By November 2014, LAN lowered it further: $7 million to $10 million. Ultimately, $8 million was put into the plant. “Schuette Files Civil Suit against Veolia and LAN for Role in Flint Water Poisoning,” press release, Department of Attorney General, Michigan.gov, n.d., https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359-82916_81983_47203-387198—,00.html; Peter J. Hammer, “The Flint Water Crisis, KWA and Strategic-Structural Racism,” written testimony submitted to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, July 18, 2016; and Peter J. Hammer, “The Flint Water Crisis, KWA and Strategic-Structural Racism: A Reply to Jeff Wright, Genesee County Drain Commissioner and CEO Karegnondi Water Authority,” written testimony submitted to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, December 31, 2016.
. According to later testimony by a Genesee County water expert, the plant wasn’t prepared to treat the water safely at the time of the switch. In April 2014, the chlorine room was still under construction, and some employees had been brought in just a couple weeks earlier from working in solid waste management; they needed three to six months of training before they could work independently. The water official said that he too, along with drain commissioner Jeff Wright and another drain official, urged the city to hold off on the switch. Leonard N. Fleming, “Expert: Flint Plant Not Ready Before Water Switch,” Detroit News, February 5, 2018.
. Glasgow delivered the email to Adam Rosenthal, Mike Prysby, and Stephen Busch of the MDEQ on April 17, 2014.
. One of them was Glasgow’s boss, Flint utilities manager Daugherty Johnson, who wrote an email on April 24, 2014, to the MDEQ’s Mike Prysby and Stephen Busch and Flint’s public works director Howard Croft. He assured the MDEQ that the plant could process Flint River water and that it wouldn’t even need Detroit’s water system as an emergency backup source.
. Adams, “Closing the Valve on History.”
. “Editorial: Switch to Flint River Water Represents New Era in Flint,” MLive—Flint Journal, April 13, 2014, updated October 8, 2015.
. Busch wrote an email on March 26, 2013, to his MDEQ colleagues, in preparation for a call about Flint’s potential switch with Treasurer Andy Dillon. The big problem, he wrote, was that Flint would not get a sufficient water supply from the Detroit system, forcing the city “to meet a significant, if not majority, of its water demands by treating water from the Flint River.” That was risky, Busch warned, because the river would “pose an increased microbial risk to public health” and “an increased risk of a disinfection by-product (carcinogen) exposure to public health.” It would also “trigger additional regulatory requirements under the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act.” Mike Prysby made a similar point in an internal email on January 23, 2013, about the feasibility of the city relying on the Flint River, when it was still on the table for the city to use it as a permanent water source. “I agree that the city should have concerns of fully utilizing the Flint River (100%) for the following: the need to soften, the potential for more advanced treatment after next round of crypto monitoring, available capacity in Flint River at 100-year low flow, residuals management (disposal of lime sludge).”
. Adams, “Closing the Valve on History.”
. According to Kim Crawford, a historian who has thoroughly researched the city’s origins, the Ojibwa name biwânag sibi is generally pronounced with a “p” sound, and with a vowel syllable between the terms for “Flinty” and “River”—so, phonetically, it’s “pe-wan-a-go-see-ba.”
. Kim Crawford, The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802–1825 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), chap. 2. Much of the Flint history from this chapter is sourced from this book, as well as from Crawford’s generous feedback on an early draft of this chapter.
. “Grand Traverse” is also the name of a bay in northern Michigan, formed by the Leelanau Peninsula jutting into the northwest part of Lake Michigan. Traverse City sits at its edge, a thriving community popular with tourists and the seat of Grande Traverse County. In the Upper Peninsula, there is also a Traverse River and a small Finnish community known as the Big Traverse Historic District. Michigan does love its crossings.
. William Hull, “Letter to William Eustis,” Fort George: August 26, 1812, vol. 40 (1929): 460–69, https://www.cmich.edu/library/clarke/ResearchResources/Native_American_Material/Excerpts_from_the_Michigan_Pioneer_and_Historical_Collections/Documents/william_pg460-469.pdf.
. Ibid.; Carl Crow (in The City of Flint Grows Up: The Success Story of an American Community [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945], p. 6) puts it at “about six million acres.”
. Crow, The City of Flint Grows Up, pp. 191–92.
. Crawford notes that there were a lot of factors that shaped the slow early settling of Flint, especially the reputation of the Saginaw band of the Ojibwas and the conflicting claims over the area around the Flint River, which made it difficult to buy land with a clear title in the early 1820s. Those who tried were making a risky investment. And alarming stories from government surveyors gave a negative overall impression of southeastern Michigan, which was exacerbated in the 1830s by the Black Hawk War.
. Smith’s body was moved from where he was first buried to Flint’s historic Glenwood Cemetery. Images of his tombstone are, at this writing, available at FindAGrave.com.
. Crow, The City of Flint Grows Up, pp. 10–13.
. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 902–3.
. S. W. Wiitala, K. E. Vanlier, and R. A. Krieger, Water Resources of the Flint Area Michigan. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1499-E (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. E13, E24–27.
. A wonderful resource about the Great Lakes is Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
. For these striking comparisons that put the scale of the lakes in perspective: Jerry Dennis, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 4; and Peter Fox, “From Montreal to Minnesota, by Inland Sea,” New York Times, August 19, 2016.
. Tocqueville was twenty-six years old at the time and bound for Detroit. As quoted in Dennis, The Living Great Lakes, p. 5.
. Eric Spitznagel, “Letter of Recommendation: Michigan,” New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2017.
. The author can’t resist describing the other strange things in the depths of the Great Lakes. It took 106 years to find the steam locomotive from the Canadian Pacific Railway train that derailed and dropped sixty feet into Lake Superior in 1910. There is a caribou hunting camp at the bottom of Lake Huron; the camp was built nine thousand years ago on land that had not yet been deluged. A cache of rare cars—268 Nash automobiles, never driven—lies under the waves of Lake Michigan, about 450 feet deep, alongside the steamship that had been ferrying them. It sank on Halloween in 1929, two days after the stock market crash. It was one of three Lake Michigan shipwrecks that week, killing eighty people altogether. And near Mackinac Island, a popular tourist destination in Lake Huron that sits between the two peninsulas, there is a submerged one-hundred-foot waterfall that is about ten thousand years old—a wildly unlikely phenomenon. Waterfalls are erosion on fast-forward, after all; they are designed to make themselves disappear. But during the post-glacial rebound, geography shifted rapidly. Mackinac Falls poured over a limestone cliff into a river that ran to the Atlantic Ocean. When Lakes Huron and Michigan hydrologically merged and a major channel was blocked, the lakes became so deep so fast that Mackinac Falls was buried underwater. Despite approaching the size of Niagara Falls, and being one mile off a resort island, nobody realized the ancient submerged waterfall was there until a research vessel stumbled across it in 2007 while testing new sounding equipment.
. Crow, The City of Flint Grows Up, pp. 17–20. By the late nineteenth century, Flint’s economy included not only sawmills, but also flour mills and the wagon and carriage factories that would evolve into the auto industry. The city was also home to makers of cigars, bricks, tile, and boxes, as well as printing and publishing houses, and dairies. In greater Genesee County, most of the land, by far, was used for farming. Rhonda Sanders, Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African Americans in Flint (Flint, Mich.: The Flint Journal and Alfred P. Sloan Museum, 1995), p. vii.
. For this chapter’s accounts of Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, the author relied on Carl Smith’s City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For New York City’s water system: Winnie Hu, “Billion-Dollar Investment in New York’s Water,” New York Times, January 19, 2018.
. Chicago’s almost unbelievably bold move to reverse the flow of the Chicago River meant that, instead of emptying into Lake Michigan, where it drew its drinking water, it turned the dirty current the other way, toward the basin of the Mississippi River and on to the Gulf of Mexico. In a U.S. Supreme Court case (Missouri v. Illinois & Sanitary District of Chicago, 180 U.S. 208 [1901]), the State of Missouri argued that Chicago had no right to send its pollution its way. But it lost, and to this day the river is reverse-engineered. Within the Great Lakes Compact, ratified in 2009 as a protocol for who gets to take water out of the lakes, and for what reasons, Chicago’s daily diversion from Lake Michigan is exempt. Dan Egan details some of the modern-day implications of this in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). See also Peter Annin, The Great Lakes Water Wars (Washington: Island Press, 2006), and Carl Smith’s City Water, City Life.
. That would be the Detroit River. The whole Great Lakes system moves eastward, with Lake Superior and Lake Michigan flowing toward Lake Huron (linked, respectively, by the St. Mary’s River and the Straits of Mackinac). Water in Lake Huron then moves through the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, and the Detroit River before opening out into Lake Erie. Then there’s a steep drop—that’s Niagara Falls. After a stint in the Niagara River, the water reaches Lake Ontario. (The alternative route between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario: the Welland Canal, which bypasses the Falls.) From there, it flows through a chain of smaller lakes (Lake St. Lawrence, Lake St. Francis, and Lake St. Louis) before becoming the St. Lawrence River, and, finally, reaching the Atlantic Ocean. An enormous watershed replenishes the Great Lakes water system.
. As the story goes, the fire started in the stable of a baker named John Harvey, when a worker, or perhaps Harvey himself, let the hot ash from his pipe drop into the dry hay. On this windy day, flames leaped beyond the livery. Detroiters streamed into the river for safety. They pulled their snuffling horses behind them and carried armfuls of possessions. There, with the cool water making their clothing heavy, they watched the inferno devour nearly every one of the city’s three hundred buildings. The memory of the fire inspired Detroit’s city motto: Speramus meliora; resurgent cineribus, or, “We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.” The Detroit Historical Society is a good resource on the fire. It’s also summarized in Michael Daisy, ed., Detroit Water and Sewage Department: The First 300 Years (Detroit: Detroit Water and Sewage Department, n.d.), http://dwsd.org/downloads_n/about_dwsd/history/complete_history.pdf.
. This was in 1824. It was amended in 1873. Clarence Monroe Burton, William Stocking, and Gordon K. Miller, eds., The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922, vol.1 (Detroit: S. J. Clark, 1922), pp. 371–77; and “History of the Water Works of the City of Detroit” (Detroit: Raynor and Taylor, 1890), p. 3, compiled in Detroit (Mich.) Board of Water Commissioners, Act of Incorporation. Regulation. History.
. Daisy, Detroit Water and Sewage Department, p. 4.
. “History of the Water Works of the City of Detroit,” pp. 6–8.
. Instead of a sewer system, St. Louis, where the American Water Works Association held its inaugural meeting, decided on the cheaper option of moving wastewater through a series of underground limestone caves. This led to at least one incredibly unfortunate flood.
. “AWWA History,” American Water Works Association. In a video on this page (last accessed March 3, 2018), Jack Hoffbuhr, a former AWWA executive director, describes how lead pipes and drinking water were discussed at the first conference. He also gives a good overview of John Snow’s cholera breakthrough, https://www.awwa.org/about-us/history.aspx.
. Gary Grant, The Water Sensitive City (West Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), p. 163; and Gregory L. Poe, The Evolution of Federal Water Pollution Control Policies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, 1995), p. 4.
. The infamous fire happened on June 22, 1969, reported variously as having been ignited by a stray spark from a passing train or by molten slag from a steel mill. Time gave it big play a couple of months later, featuring dramatic photos of the Cuyahoga River engulfed in flames—photos that were actually taken during another fire on the same river in 1952. “Unfortunately, water pollution knows no political boundaries,” the magazine piece read. It indicted the way that rivers were treated as “convenient, free sewers.” “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism,” Time, August 1, 1969. See also Doron P. Levin, “River Not Yet Clean, but It’s Fireproof,” New York Times, June 25, 1989.
. Another legislative victory of the environmental movement was the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, where the government for the first time attempted to articulate what hazardous waste is and how it should be handled. Rather than just addressing end-of-pipeline waste, as earlier laws did, it also made the reduction or elimination of waste one of its primary goals.
. This was described in an article by James L. Agee, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water and hazardous materials, in an article in EPA Journal (March 1975, vol. 1, no. 3), titled “Protecting America’s Drinking Water: Our Responsibilities Under the Safe Drinking Water Act.” He wrote, “This may seem to be a restatement of the obvious, but it is a principle all too often violated by the Federal government. Paperwork cannot protect health—only action can.”
. A little more on the Safe Drinking Water Act. It is the law that requires the EPA to develop and enforce drinking water standards. That includes the ability to set Maximum Contaminant Levels, or MCLs, for any substances that might be in drinking water that could harm public health. The early limit on lead was 50 parts per billion (ppb), and it applied only to water as it entered the distribution system, rather than at the tap (after its flow had come in contact with lead service lines, lead solder, and indoor plumbing). Eventually, the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule of 1991 set a lower limit for lead at the tap: 15 ppb. (However, the regulatory formula still allows up to 10 percent of samples in any given community to exceed 15 ppb before taking any action about it.) For implementation of this and other SDWA regulations, the EPA relies on state agencies, Native American tribes, and local water systems for monitoring and treatment. In Michigan, that meant the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had primacy—or primary enforcement responsibility—for making sure that the state’s public water systems met all the safety requirements, including lead limits. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Drinking Water Requirements for States and Public Water Systems: Primacy Enforcement Responsibility for Public Water Systems.” EPA.gov, n.d., https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/primacy-enforcement-responsibility-public-water-systems, last accessed March 2, 2016; Yanna Lambrinidou, Simoni Triantafyllidou, and Marc Edwards, “Failing Our Children: Lead in U.S. School Drinking Water,” New Solutions, vol. 20(1), 2010, pp. 25–47; Yanna Lambrinidou, written communication to the author, February 20, 2018.
. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970,” https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/reorganization-plan-no-3-1970.html.
. According to its archived website, this made the DWSD “the third largest provider of high-quality drinking water and wastewater treatment services in the United States.”
. Flint’s first water system was founded in 1883, a private concern called the Flint Water Works Company, which delivered raw water from the Flint River to ratepayers. Twenty years later, the city purchased it for $262,500 and made it a public utility. In 1911, the plant began filtering water. As the city rapidly grew, about $12.5 million in capital improvements were put into the system between 1947 and 1955, which improved storage, treatment, and pumping. The Dort Highway plant that was rebooted in the twenty-first century was built in 1952. This is outlined in the Flint Water Advisory Task Force Final Report (March 2016), which in turn cites a brochure called “The Water Supply of Flint, Michigan,” which the city provided to the task force. For more on Flint’s drinking water history, including the information that follows on its water consumption, see S. W. Wiitala, K. E. Vanlier, and R. A. Krieger, Water Resources of the Flint Area, Michigan. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 1499-E (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1963).
. The corruption scandal in the 1960s and Flint’s decision-making process about its future with drinking water were chronicled by the robust newspapers, especially the Detroit Free Press and, published by Freep reporters during a strike, the Detroit Daily Press. Among them: “2 City Officials Ousted at Flint,” Detroit Free Press, February 8, 1964, p. 21; “$39 Million Water Bond Sale OK’d,” Detroit Daily Press, October 7, 1967, sec. B, p. 4; Hal Cohen, “Water Sale to Stall City’s Fluoridation,” Detroit Free Press, January 25, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; Harry Golden Jr., “City No Trickster in Fluoride Fight,” Detroit Free Press, January 10, 1965, sec. C, p. 3; “Huge Waterway for Michigan Studied,” Detroit Free Press, October 10, 1967, sec. A, p. 8; “Indicted in Flint Scandal: Pontiac City Manager Quits,” Detroit Free Press, February 12, 1964, sec. A, p. 1; George Jaksa, “3 Officials in Flint Cleared,” Detroit Free Press, February 24, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; George Jaksa, “Flint Votes for Detroit Water Deal,” Detroit Free Press, April 23, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; “Lake Huron Water Plant Deal OK’d,” Detroit Free Press, July 6, 1962, sec. A, p. 3; Eric Pianin, “Suburb Raises an Uproar over Water Rate Hike,” Detroit Daily Press, December 26, 1967, p. 5; “Pipe Job to Start for Huron Water,” Detroit Free Press, January 29, 1964, sec. A, p. 1; “Pontiac Manager Indicted in Fraud,” Detroit Free Press, July 29, 1965, sec. A, p. 3; “Two Face Conspiracy Charges,” Detroit Free Press, November 27, 1964, sec. A, p. 3; “Water Officials to Confer Here,” Detroit Daily Press, September 3, 1964, p. 13. For more contemporary sources on this debacle: “The Flint Water Crisis: Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Flint,” Report of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, February 17, 2017, pp. 52–54, https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/VFlintCrisisRep-F-Edited3-13-17_554317_7.pdf; Ron Fonger, “50 Years Later: Ghosts of Corruption Still Linger Along Old Path of Failed Flint Water Pipeline,” MLive—Flint Journal, November 12, 2012.
. Andrew R. Highsmith discusses this in-depth in Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), especially in chap. 5.
. “New Huron Water Line Is Hailed,” Detroit Free Press, December 15, 1967, p. 3; and “2nd Step of Huron Water Project Near Finish,” Detroit Free Press, December 12, 1967, p. 2. The Detroit water system grew into one of the largest public utilities in the nation. Its headquarters suggested the sort of majesty with which the city approached water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the people were invited to be part of it. The water department was situated on a 110-acre riverfront park on the east side. It featured a manmade canal with two islands, two greenhouses, and a 185-foot minaret tower that offered spectacular views of the city to those who braved its winding staircase. There was also a hobby center for woodcrafts, a mooring basin for seaplanes, playgrounds, rowboats, a baseball diamond, groves of chestnut and pear trees, a children’s wading pool, and a popular floral clock made of more than seven thousand plants that was powered by paddlewheels. The first branch of the Detroit Public Library opened there, staffed, somewhat awkwardly, by employees of the water department. To this day, a massive Beaux-Arts gateway monument marks the entry onto the campus, built to honor the longtime president of the Board of Water Commissioners who left nearly all of his estate for the maintenance of the grounds. But in 1945 the minaret tower, deemed too expensive to maintain, was demolished. Six years later, the whole park was shut down. Public outcry compelled the city to reopen a bit of it, but the effort was halfhearted and short-lived. Water Works Park has been closed for more than fifty years. The locked gateway is the only sign that it once existed.