Years after the emergency, the Michigan city is yet to replace all lead pipes and affected families are still awaiting justice
Earlier this month, Brittany Thomas received a call that her 11-year-old daughter Janiyah had experienced a seizure at school.
“She’d been seizure-free for about two years now,” said Thomas, a resident of Flint, Michigan. “And they just came back.”
The call took Thomas back to April 2014, when, to save money, the City of Flint switched to a water source that exposed more than 100,000 residents – including up to 12,000 children – to elevated levels of lead and bacteria. Thomas’s family drank bottled water at the time, but they cooked with and bathed in the tap water.
Soon after the switch, Thomas and her two children developed rashes on their skin. Then the children began experiencing frequent seizures that sent them in and out of the hospital. Blood tests revealed they had lead poisoning.
“I didn’t know how to feel,” she said. “I’ve been depressed, I’ve been frustrated, stressed out – can’t catch a break.”
Studies later showed that after officials changed Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, the percentage of children with elevated levels of lead levels in their blood doubled – and in some parts of the city, tripled. The switch also exposed residents to the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease, leading to as many as 115 deaths.
It hasn’t been resolved because Flint needs the money to resolve it and those people live there. The city has been trying, apparently, but they would do a lot more if they had the money to do so.
That’s a pittance when spread across the country’s municipalities and it will never cover it.
But I guarantee you that if Flint was a city that wasn’t majority black, a hell of a lot more would have been done by now.
If Flint wasn’t majority black this probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Systemic.
They have replaced a lot of the pipes apparently, the ones remaining are the hardest and most expensive.