6 Key Updates On Flint, Michigan's Water Crisis

By Mae Rice in News on Jan 21, 2016 7:16PM

Government officials have declared an escalating series of emergencies in Flint, Michigan due to polluted water that has caused an epidemic of lead-poisoning among Flint children and left the city reliant on bottled water.

In mid-December, the city declared a state of emergency; in early January, the state government declared the same. At this point, the scandal has gone national. President Barack Obama was the latest to declare an emergency, qualifying the city for $5 million, according to the Tribune.

So far, here's the key information that has surfaced:

* On Wednesday, the day after Michigan's State of the State speech, Michigan governor Rick Snyder released hundreds of pages of government emails surrounding the water crisis. They show the state government underestimating the crisis (in its earlier days, Governor Rick Snyder’s then-chief of staff Dennis Muchmore called it “a swirl of misinformation”) and trying to shift blame onto the city of Flint itself, according to the Tribune’s report. It’s well-worth reading, and they posted the full .pdf of the emails, too.

* Let’s not overestimate the transparency behind this email release, though. Twitter has been inundated with screenshots of the first email in the packet, which looks like this:

* This is the summary of the crisis that has gone relatively viral on Twitter. As a 140-character synopsis of a structural problem with deep roots, it’s not bad! (And though Elliott did some slight rounding, the numbers check out.)

* In Politico, Gordon Young—who was born in Flint—ties this most recent crisis into Flint’s larger, decades-long struggle to ride the wave of modernity. As the birthplace of General Motors, the town has been hit hard by deindustrialization (and General Motors’ exit from the city). There are so many abandoned buildings in town now that Young reports, “Crowds often gather to watch the houses and buildings burn. It’s cheap entertainment.” Young also notes that the police force has been decimated by budget concerns, despite a high murder rate—so much so that “the police station is closed on weekends.” It’s a harrowing read.

* In Vox, a current Flint local, Connor Coyne, writes about the crisis in the first-person, illustrating how hard it would have been for Flint residents to “know better” than to drink the water. Not only does he point out that water high in lead can run clear, he also points out that he—and most of us—place some basic trust in government.

Even for a city in which one mayor had suggested we cut down all of the trees and put them up for sale and another had commissioned a massive bronze statue of himself, poisoning children with tap water just sounded too cartoonish to be real.

The idea of the massive conspiracy involving collusion between local, state, and federal authorities that must have been involved in such a situation was too absurd to consider. Wasn't evil supposed to be banal instead of burlesque?

* Currently, government officials are giving out free water filters to Flint residents, but it's unclear whether the water filters could actually reduce the levels of lead in the water.