I had a feeling this was coming, at least they are trying: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0128/Flint-s-newest-challenge-a-flood-of-plastic-bottles-video
why did Flint switch to this unsafe water source?
could the city no longer afford their previous source of clean water for some reason?
@soccerguy315 - to save money, yes.
The economics of this are complicated. Cities in the Great Lakes region like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit tend to have cheaper water than most of the country because local supplies of clean, fresh water are so abundant. But the water utilities have high fixed costs, When their customer base began shrinking due to declining industrial activity, prices rose for the remaining customers, who essentially are paying for surplus capacity. Detroit long supplied Flint and other nearby municipalities with high quality water from Lake Huron. Flint apparently decided it could do better financially by switching to another supplier that was building a new pipeline from Lake Huron but they got caught in the switches when the new pipeline wasn’t completed on time. At this point Flint went ahead and started drawing water directly from the Flint River. The river water wasn’t bad per se, it just had a different chemical composition and needed to be treated so it didn’t corrode lead pipes of the kind that can be found in every older city. That’s where the system failed. They went ahead without the proper safeguards and without a proper treatment plan, and the switch was approved by the state Department of Environmental Quality, which should have known better The lead pipes corroded, lead contamination reached unacceptable levels (much higher than regulatory limits), and when citizens complained, the city council voted to switch back to Detroit water but that decision was vetoed by the governor-appointed emergency manager who said it would be too expensive. At that point the city and state were insisting the water was safe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Make of that what you will. Certainly some incompetence, probably some malfeasance, possibly an attempted cover-up, arguably reckless disregard for human life and health in the interest of saving a few bucks.
Dr. Hanna-Atisha is giving a talk about the crisis at U of M’s School of Public Health on Wednesday. (In irrelevant but related news, I found out that she was a graduate of the same MPH program as me.)
It’s open to the public if anyone is in the Ann Arbor area and interested: https://sph.umich.edu/flint-crisis/events.html
thanks for sharing that info, bclintonk.
I’m sure no one would agree now that the decision to switch to this cheaper water source was a good idea.
But if the switch went fine, people would probably be happy to save money.
I wonder if the money situation for the city was so bad that the leaders felt force to make the decision to switch.
There is no place in the USA where a municipality is actually FORCED to switch to an unsafe water source and not install the necessary treatment plants. As if the municipality would actually have to die of thirst if they didn’t take their chances. Don’t try to make excuses for them.
@romanigypsyeyes, I wsa wondering if her degree was from your program! 
Late breaking news: the EPA just released the results of recent tests of Flint tap water at many Flint households. Flint stopped using the Flint River about three months ago, and there was hope that the water had improved since then.
Evidently not. The water in many houses has so much lead that the water filters they’ve been handing out are not capable of handling it. Actionable levels of lead in water are 15 ppb. The filters are capable of filtering water that has up to 150 ppb of lead, but many Flint houses, they have now discovered, have more than that. The worst reading was over 4000 ppb. Officials are now telling people not to drink their tap water unless it has been tested and found to be safe, where “safe” in this context means it has lead, but not enough lead to overwhelm the water filter.
The same Michigan government that sent bottled water to state office buildings in Flint for a year now is not willing to proactively go door to door in Flint to test the water that the state poisoned and to hand out water and filters. Instead, Flint residents, many of whom don’t have cars, are instructed to go to their local fire stations where they may or may not be able to get water, filters and lead testing kits. If a resident does get a lead testing kit, they then must go home, collect the sample, return it to the fire station (for many, on foot, by bus or on bike because they don’t have cars) and wait three days for the state to (we hope) call them and tell them either their water is OK, or they need to have further tests.
Sorry no links. The story was reported on Rachel Maddow tonight.
I’m glad that’s finally come out.
I thought I had posted that in my last post about the recycling but I guess not. It has been well-known in the plumbing community that this is the case, but like everything else it got lost in the noise and/or ignored.
Thanks for the update.
Here is a link that I just saw floating on facebook: http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/01/29/epa-high-lead-levels-flint-exceed-filters-ability/79540740/
Questions are now starting to emerge about whether the decision to switch Flint from Detroit water to a private pipeline was really intended as a cost-saving move at all. Local reports are now claiming authenticated e-mail communications from Detroit Water officials to Flint officials in 2013 indicate Detroit was prepared to cut the rates it charged Flint for wholesale water, offering a substantially lower price than that promised by the private pipeline. These offers were apparently rebuffed.
Also keep in mind that municipalities that buy water from Detroit typically pass those costs along to their own customers in the form of water charges, so in the normal course of affairs, the price those communities pay Detroit shouldn’t affect municipal fiances all that much, apart from the water the city government itself uses. But water bills in Flint were much higher than in surrounding communities which also got their water from Detroit–not because Flint was paying Detroit more, but because Flint had higher costs of repairing and replacing old, crumbling infrastructure (250 water main breaks in 2014 v. 6 in the surrounding county, despite the county having 3 X Flint’s population), high fixed costs spread over a declining customer base due to industrial decline and population loss, and an exceptionally poor population, many of whom simply couldn’t afford to pay their water bills, resulting in large numbers of delinquencies, causing rates to go even higher to cover the shortfall. All these factors conspired to drive Flint residents’ water bills inexorably higher, causing even more delinquencies in a city where the poverty rate is above 40%. The upshot: Flint households were being charged an average of $140/month for water, about 3 times what suburban Genesee County residents were paying. Flint’s water system was in a death spiral, with rising rates charged by Detroit being at most a small factor in the equation as evidenced by the fact that surrounding communities using Detroit water were doing just fine.
The kicker came in 2011 when Flint officials (I believe a state-appointed emergency manager, but I’m not certain of that) decided to raid the city’s water and sewer fund to pay a $16 million settlement in a lawsuit stemming from sewer overflows. That forced the city to jack up water rates another 35% to cover the shortfall, pushing even more customers into delinquency. A state court later ruled the raid on the water and sewer fund unlawful and ordered rebates, but that offered only temporary relief, leaving another deficit and prompting another series of sharp annual rate increases. Even today, Flint residents are being billed exorbitant amounts for water that’s literally unsafe to use.
So why the switch to the private pipeline, if not to save money? One hypothesis is that it was just an ideologically driven attempt to privatize public services—though in that sort of situation, where a single private entity stands to benefit, graft isn’t out of the question. Another hypothesis is that it was a politically motivated attack on Detroit’s residual power through its control of the regional water supply system. A third hypothesis, related to the first two, was that it was motivated by the belief that in the long run competition would mean lower prices and better service, and giving a private competitor a leg up by getting the franchise on the northern fringe of metro Detroit would get that competition going—even if in the short term there would be little or no cost saving. (It’s worth noting that one county south of Flint’s Genesee County is populous Oakland County (pop. 1.2 million), the wealthiest county in metro Detroit, so if the private pipeline captured Genesee County it would make Oakland County the next logical competitive battleground). Another hypothesis is that it was just a smokescreen, a false (and cynical) promise to Flint residents that government was doing “something big” to bring their untenable water rates down. Or some combination of all of these. Or something else entirely. But enough inquiring minds want to know that we’ll probably learn something, sooner or later.
I need to take back a key piece of my previous post (#109). The KWA pipeline being built to supply water from Lake Huron is actually not a private, for-profit entity, but an intergovernmental agency made up of municipalities and counties in the Flint area and some neighboring counties. Apparently it’s been Flint’s dream since the 1960s to have its own water supply so as not to be dependent on Detroit. Or Flint’s “pipe dream,” if you don’t mind the pun.
But let’s separate the decision to switch to a different pipeline from the decision to take water directly from the Flint River without proper treatment. It’s the latter decision that’s putting human life and health at risk. That decision was unconscionable, even if switching to a different source of Lake Huron water made economic sense.
consolation, I’m not trying to make excuses. I’m trying to understand why this happened. If we don’t understand why it happens, then we can’t stop it from happening again.
I think it is most likely misguided to suggest that the thought process was “let’s use unsafe water because it is cheaper”
The engineers and researchers from Virginia Tech’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department have tried to help with this. As their site related to this says " Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public" - The first Canon of Civil Engineering. I think this whole mess has been a combination of factors including politics and bureaucracy. Are there also scientists and/or engineers that may have looked the other way? If so, that will probably come out as this is being looked at closely. It all needs to get fixed as lots of municipal water supplies are vulnerable and we need to make sure this does not happen in other communities.
If you appoint a head of the Department of Environment Quality who is not a scientist, and who does not believe in environmental regulations, you should not fall over in astonishment when he doesn’t enforce environmental regulations.
I’m not sure if this has been posted here yet, but I can’t find it if it is: The reason the city started drawing water from the Flint River was because when the decision was made to switch to the new water authority, the Detroit water authority exercised a provision in the contract that forced Flint to get off their system within a certain amount of time that was sooner than the new water authority would be in place. Flint had a plan for many years that included the Flint River as its back-up water supply in case of emergency. Today’s Detroit Free Press reported that the switch could have worked had the folks implementing the switch pulled their heads out of their behinds long enough to consider what controls they needed to put in place to ensure that the switch was done properly. That would have included some particular chemicals or processes that would have kept the corrosion issue from occurring. It is absolutely imperative that things be thought through completely and thoroughly when public health decisions are being made. They need folks who care about health to weigh in … not just folks who care about saving money (yes, I mean emergency managers and the like). Ordinary citizens trust the people in charge to make decisions with the public good in mind. Unfortunately, that often is not the case.
And this is not an extremely complicated thing to do (to treat the water). As I think I said before, ANYONE who has ANY familiarity with water systems knows that river water is more corrosive than lake water. There is a pretty standard way to treat river water which has been proven effective time and again.
The fact that it wasn’t done demonstrates incompetence and arrogance on the part of those “in charge.”
And now that water will never be safe until the pipes are replaced. The lead is coming from the now-corroded pipes and the only way to fix that is to replace the piping system which will likely take millions, if not billions, of dollars to do correctly and completely.
Lots of FL news. All the rainwe have had has led to insecticides into water system. Big sugar is one company that has contributed to this problem, even if accidentally. Local,people need to use bottled water.
I was just thinking of the burden on the firefighters, with having the fire stations distribute the mountains of bottled water as well as water filters, and distributing and receiving the lead water tests. I hope there is staff/volunteers to do that work, it’s not like the firefighters don’t already have work to do.
Also, I hope they have checked the fire truck fittings as well as the fire hydrants for corrosion of their parts.
since the government is responsible for this mess, I think it means the affected parties will not be able to sue? Is this accurate?
You can sue Toyota if they give you a faulty car, but I don’t think you can sue the government for faulty drinking water.
^The government isn’t responsible - the ad hoc administrator (possibly, the governor who appointed him) who decided to “save” is/are - if he had no clue about river water vs. lake water, he could have listened to scientists. Or anyone, really, with a modicum of knowledge. It’s really not complicated and, really, quick to listen to, easy to understand, not that hard to fix before it happens.
Also, the issue isn’t faulty drinking water - the issue is reckless disregard for science and people’s safety when switching to cheaper water that would require a different cleaning process.
There was a very clear effect of “there is no worse deafness than the one who doesn’t have to hear”.