Flint water crisis: news and updates

Five Michigan state officials have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of a man who contracted a fatal illness from contaminated water in the city of Flint.

Robert Skidmore died in December 2015 from Legionnaires’ disease after local water was contaminated and health officials failed to notify the public. According to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, the 85-year-old was one of at least a dozen Flint-area residents who died of Legionnaires’ disease due to the water contamination.

Mary Huddleston won’t drink the water that comes out of her tap, but in January she got a water bill for more than $1,000.

In December, the city of Flint, Michigan, installed a new water meter in her house, and when the first reading came back, Huddleston was told she’d been undercharged and now owed the city $1,090.09 in back payments.

The beleaguered citizens of Flint, Michigan, who experienced one of the worst lead poisoning crises in recent memory, are now getting at least $97 million in federal and state money to pay for new, lead-free pipes.

A federal judge in Detroit has approved $97 million for rebuilding Flint’s water infrastructure and supporting ongoing health interventions in a lawsuit that sought compensation for widespread lead contamination caused by city officials.

There’s been a lot of noise in my Flint neighborhood this month.

Men wearing big coats and gloves drive bulldozers and forklifts up and down the street, sliding orange cones back and forth, sometimes blocking off whole intersections with their trucks. They use their heavy equipment to slice through the pavement and the thick roots of our 90-year-old silver maples. They dig giant holes and pull out chunks of old pipe. The workers are here from early in the morning until late at night, when the flashing yellow lights on their vehicles compete with the Christmas lights and candle-bedecked houses.

In this wild presidential year, it can feel like nothing is happening but Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

But on Wednesday, Congress somehow managed to get itself back into the spotlight. Both the House and Senate approved a series of measures before clocking out for recess — legislation that will keep the government open, bring federal aid to lead-plagued Flint, Michigan, provide flood relief to thousands in Louisiana, and return a 9,000-year-old man to his rightful ancestors.

Congressional leaders reached a deal to avoid a government shutdown on Wednesday — when just a day earlier it looked nearly certain.

Democrats in the House and Senate had threatened to shut down the federal government without federal funding to deal with the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan. They wanted emergency money for Flint relief included in the federal budget, and they didn’t think the government should be funded without it.

Michigan’s attorney general is suing two companies for their involvement in the Flint water crisis.

In a news conference in Flint on Wednesday morning, Bill Schuette disclosed that his office has filed paperwork to bring negligence and public nuisance litigation against both Veolia, a French resource management firm, and Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, an engineering corporation based in Texas. Veolia will also face an additional charge of fraud.

Halfway through President Obama’s speech in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday — after he’d praised the volunteers who helped in the city’s water crisis, and before he argued the crisis shows the limits of private action — he started coughing. His next words were probably inevitable: “Can I get some water?”

After he took a (filtered) sip of the city’s infamous water, contaminated with lead since September 2015, Obama pivoted to an argument greeted much more skeptically than his condemnation of the “carelessness and callousness” that created the crisis: What happened in Flint was a moral outrage, but it was no longer a medical emergency. And residents shouldn’t give up hope for their kids.

Eight-year-old Mari Copeny of Flint, Michigan, has become one of the faces of the water crisis: She’s rallied at protests around the Democratic presidential debate, attended Congressional hearings in a “Flint Lives Matter” T-shirt, and now extracted a promise from President Obama to visit Flint.

Before her visit to the March 17 Congressional hearing on Flint, where Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder testified, Mari wrote to Obama asking to meet with him:

Three people are finally facing criminal charges in the Flint water crisis: two state officials and one city employee who, according to Michigan’s attorney general, covered up the high levels of lead in the city’s water and stopped investigations into other water-related health risks.

Arguments about who’s to blame for the Flint crisis have focused on the state-appointed emergency managers who oversaw the switch to river water; the state Department of Environmental Quality; and Gov. Rick Snyder himself, who pushed for stronger emergency manager laws that some say enabled the crisis.

The water in Flint, Michigan, still isn’t getting back to normal. And the political crisis brought about by national attention to the city’s lead problem shows no signs of abating either. So Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is trying to kill two birds with one stone: He announced that he’d be drinking (filtered) water from Flint for 30 days to to try to restore residents’ confidence.

But Snyder could struggle to get this message across for both political and scientific reasons. His approval ratings have plummeted, and a recent poll found 44 percent of Michigan residents think he’s doing his job poorly.

When we calculated the lead exposure risk of every census tract in America, one major finding stuck out: The vast majority of areas at risk are in urban areas. And health officials generally cite deteriorated lead-based paint in the home — not lead in pipes — as the leading source of lead exposure, which is why relatively inexpensive housing policies can work to reduce incidences of lead poisoning.

We found that 92 percent of the census tracts most at risk are located in urban areas. In some, like New York and Chicago, about 20 percent of census tracts have the highest risk score. In smaller metro areas with populations under 2 million, like Cleveland and Milwaukee, more than 30 percent of census tracts have the highest risk score.

As it became public that the water in Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead, the federal official overseeing water quality in the city argued that the city shouldn’t be allowed to use federal money to buy water filters for residents’ homes.

The problem, the official argued, was that Flint had struggled financially and so couldn’t be trusted to use the money wisely.

During the Democratic debate in February in Flint, Michigan, Hillary Clinton made a significant and mostly overlooked promise.

“I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead,” Clinton said in a city plagued by a lead crisis. “It’s not only in water, but in soil and lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. … We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere.”

At Thursday’s Republican debate, moderators gave Ohio Gov. John Kasich a chance to rebuke Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder for his handling of the Flint water crisis. And Kasich did so — rather gently.

“Every single engine of government has to move when you see a crisis like that,” Kasich said, when asked how he would have handled the situation.

By last January, people in Flint, Michigan, knew something was wrong with their water. It smelled and tasted bad. It was the color of rust. And they’d already been told it was contaminated with chemicals that can cause cancer.

Publicly, the state insisted all this was nothing to worry about. Privately, they made sure their own employees wouldn’t have to drink Flint’s water.

On one level, the Flint lead poisoning scandal is about a state mismanaging a city under financial duress and moving the city to a water supply that turned out to be unsafe.

But on another level, it’s also about something deeper: the vulnerabilities kids face when they grow up in poverty. They are more likely to have lower test scores, become teen mothers, and experience violent crime. And it’s not just a lack of opportunity: A recent study found that the stresses of poverty actually stunt brain development.

The Flint water crisis has captured national attention, but, paradoxically, one benefit of city services failing as egregiously as they have in Flint is that many families have been able to largely avoid the toxic water that was pumping into the city’s homes. Urban soil lead, by contrast, is a problem that slips past people unnoticed. So unnoticed, in fact, that there is actually a higher incidence of lead-poisoned children in nearby Detroit, where the water is fine, than there is in Flint.

Here are the striking numbers:

The city of Flint, Michigan, is in the midst of a terrible and rightly shocking lead poisoning crisis. The number of kids testing positive for elevated lead levels in their bloodstreams has doubled in the past few years, after the city switched to a new, cheaper water source.

This is an extreme case, but the problem of lead exposure among children is not a local Flint story. If you look at public health data, you begin to realize two things. The first is that it’s actually really hard to get good data on which kids do and don’t experience lead exposure, and which parents should worry about the issue.

It’s that it took the threat of lifelong damage to children to get state officials to pay attention to what residents and politicians had been saying for a year: Flint’s water was unsafe and undrinkable.

Snyder, in his State of the State address on Tuesday night, announced he would release emails from his office related to the Flint crisis in the interest of transparency.

President Obama reassured the people of Michigan that he’s “got Flint’s back” Wednesday, during a visit with representatives from Detroit’s auto industry.

What quickly turned into a congratulatory speech about the resurgence of America’s Motor City began with a few words about the tragedy in Flint, where 4 percent of the children have been poisoned with lead in the city’s water.

When unsafe levels of lead were found in the water in Flint, Michigan, it became a political crisis for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder as well as a public health crisis.

Tuesday night, amid harsh criticism, Snyder tried to fix the situation, devoting most of his annual State of the State address to Flint.

The water in Flint, Michigan, poisoned the town’s children with lead for months. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has declared a state of emergency, which is necessary to get federal assistance to manage the problem.

Four percent of Flint’s children have elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream — double the share affected a few years ago, according to tests from Flint’s Hurley Medical Center confirmed by the state.

The story of Flint, Michigan’s children being poisoned by lead-contaminated drinking water has, rightly, shocked and scandalized the nation. But while the situation in Flint is certainly an extreme case, the problem is much more widespread than many realize: Children in essentially every city in America are being exposed to hazardous levels of toxic lead, and very little is being done about it.

At the most severe levels, according to the World Health Organization, “lead attacks the brain and central nervous system to cause coma, convulsions, and even death.” Thankfully, very little lead poisoning that severe is happening in the United States. But lead’s impact on the brain — particularly the developing brains of children and fetuses — is severe and systematic, “resulting in reduced [IQ], behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment.” At least mild versions of these impacts are felt at even low levels of exposure “that cause no obvious symptoms and that previously were considered safe.”