A State of Emergency

America is the land of prosperity. It is the land of opportunity, of the best colleges, of the best health care. If this is true, then how did this happen to the town of Flint?

The Water Flowing Out of Taps in Flint, MI
Image Courtesy of Flint Journal

This is the water flowing out of the taps of 100,000 resident's homes in the town of Flint, Michigan. Something is clearly not right. Clean water is undeniably crucial to ensure people's safety and health. Clean water is so important that the United Nations agreed that clean water is a human right in 2002.

From a distance, a casual observer might suppose that this water had dirt in it; maybe a pipe had fractured and was allowing dirt to seep into the supply. If only this were the case. Upon testing, the water showed significantly elevated levels of lead.  You know, the heavy metal that caused a frenzy years back when children's toys were painted with cheap paints that contained the metal. The maximum concentration in water allowed by law is 15 parts per billion. Flint water was showing numbers like 400. Children are particularly susceptible to the affects of lead due to their growing bodies. Children with lead poisoning can have things like a lower IQ, hearing problems, slowed growth, according to the EPA. As of now, about 200 children in the Flint area have been shown to have elevated blood-lead levels. It is however too early to tell the true affects of the lead-poisoned water.

If this doesn't sound bad enough, there have been at least 87 cases of Legionnaires' disease in Flint in the past 17-months. Legionnaires' is a "severe, often lethal, form of pneumonia" caused by Legionella pneumophila, a bacteria found in potable water systems, according to legionella.org. Don Kooy, head of the McLaren hospital in Flint, MI, said that he and other experts think that the outbreak was caused by the city's dangerous water.

But how did it get this far? How, in America, were children being poisoned by the water running out of their tap?

To get to the bottom of it, we have to go back to 2014. Before 2014, Flint was buying water from the Detroit water supply, and everything was dandy. The water contained a chemical called orthophosphate, which prevented lead from the pipes from leaching into the water. Then, in an attempt to save money, the city wanted to start to use water from it's own river. Not only did their water not contain the orthophosphate, it also had eight times the chlorine levels that Detroit's water had. Chlorine is a corrosive to metal; so when Flint started flowing their water through the pipes, it corroded the pipes, leaching iron and lead into the water supply.

Image Courtesy of time.com

Back in October, Flint finally switched back over to Detroit water, but it was too late. The water is still very unsafe to drink. The image below shows the progression of water samples from January 15th to January 21, 2015.

Image Courtesy of FlintWaterStudy.org

On the 16th of January this year, President Obama declared a state of emergency in Flint, authorizing FEMA to use funds for disaster relief. You normally see FEMA use funds for hurricanes or tornados, not the incompetence of city governance. While the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder has apologized, and called his delay in response "inexplicable and inexcusable," he has neither resigned or found a satisfactory solution for the citizens who still have no clean water to drink, besides bottled water. While Flint is planning on joining a new water authority, they must wait for a pipeline to be built, a pipeline which is planned to be completed in June 2016.

This story shows a stark reality for America. Water isn't a given, water isn't some liquid that magically shoots out of your tap perfect and safe to drink. Water is a commodity that must be carefully considered and carefully monitored, even in a developed country like America. Here we have a city of 100,000 people (to put it in perspective, State College has a population of ~42,000), where safe water for bathing, drinking, and cooking must be brought in bottles by disaster relief groups. Water needs to be thought about; water needs to be appreciated.