RPT: FEATURE - Flint Water Crisis Enters Year 6 Unresolved, Leaving Michigan Town Vulnerable To Pandemic

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th April, 2020) ASHINGTON, April 25 (Sputnik), Barrington M. Salmon - After six years of living with water poisoned by lead, many of Flint, Michigan's residents have been left medically vulnerable to catching the novel coronavirus.

In 2014, then-Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and other state government officials switched the public water source from freshwater drawn from Lake Huron, via Detroit, to the dirty, polluted and corrosive Flint River. This produced health issues and other consequences for Flint's almost 100,000 residents that still reverberates in 2020.

That is an enduring concern of environmental activists and others who spoke to Sputnik who are alarmed about the lasting impact of lead poisoning on the women, men and especially children who live in Flint.

"My background is in neuroscience. There are a lot of links between lead poisoning and COVID-19," said Jasmine Hall, an epidemiologist who grew up in Flint and has a lot of family members still living there. "I'm super passionate about this. It's frustrating. Six years in, with the coronavirus, I could see this as an opportunity for us to revisit the issue."

Michigan, as of Friday, had� more than 36,600 confirmed coronavirus cases including over 3,000 deaths, according to official state data.

Hall, 26, said Flint is more resilient, residents know each other, there are new partnerships and coalitions and people in a number of institutions are starting to talk more and develop consensus on ways to improve the health and water situation.

However, she said she remains deeply concerned about the dangers lead continues to pose to Flint residents.

"Flint stands to be devastated by this," said Hall, who is a member of Black Millennials For Flint and who serves as a Lead Prevention Ambassador. "Cardiovascular, kidney and neurological diseases are all diseases that you get from the water crisis. Black and brown communities with preexisting conditions are more vulnerable to COVID-19. Now is the time to say medical racism is real."

For more than a year and a half after the water switch, Flint residents knew something was very wrong with the water. The disgusting smell and the brown liquid flowing out of their taps were clear and convincing evidence but state officials, beginning with Snyder, dawdled and stonewalled as complaints from frustrated and concerned Flint residents mounted. The governor's former spokesman, state and city officials and others, dismissive of the chorus of complaints, continued to insist that the water was safe to drink.

The switch, initiated in April 2014, was supposed to save $5 million. The order came from Snyder but a decision by state water officials to opt out of using corrosion prohibitors which would have cost a mere $50 a day, produced a man-made public health disaster that has affected the lives and health of many of Flint's residents, particularly children.

General Motors officials were so concerned that they shut off the water at a local plant because of the corrosion and other damage the water was doing to their vehicles.

Some residents became ill, some lost their hair and others broke out in rashes. Children experienced behavioral problems, and other publications described mothers having miscarriages, the spread of infectious diseases such as Legionnaire's Disease and in some cases, the death of affected individuals.

Flint residents are and were angry and frustrated as they become more immersed in a nightmare they contend was created by government indifference, irresponsibility and a governor's eye focused more on the bottom line than on the effect state policy might have on human beings.

Dr. Shantella Sherman said she's not surprised that Michigan's government officials failed to respond adequately and have so far dropped the ball on correcting what is a life-and-death situation.

"What tends to happen is that when you hold people culpable, these people tend to hide away, and lawyers are in place to protect them," said Dr. Sherman. "There are no easy fixes. A resolution needs to get looked at. A good part of the problem is that they redirected the water. They should be re-piping. That to me is the problem. Everywhere you look, there are new structures, developments."

Even if you have to pull money from other sources, she added, the government should address and fix the problem.

"It's a state and Federal problem. In six years, the state, city and county couldn't find money to fix the problem," the doctor said.

Sherman, a historian and journalist whose work documents African American history, popular culture, Women & Gender studies, Black British culture, and the American Eugenics movement, said it's important for people to look at the health impact.

"It's more important. Toxins are in the ground and in the air, so why haven't you been able to fix it?" she asked. "You're trying to tell me that a superpower, the greatest country in the world can't fix this problem? America is way too powerful to be invaded but it will implode because of benign neglect."

Environmental Activist LaTricia Adams said despite her dismay, there has been progress made over time.

"There has been a significant replacement of pipes since they initiated changes. But if you are a renter, you have to get consent from landlords," said Adams, founder of Black Millennials for Flint. "However, some property owners are overseas. It's nearly impossible to give consent. It's really a problem. This needs to be changed urgently. We say they should do what Newark is doing - replace all the pipes."

The City of Flint has excavated 25,400 service lines in its effort to replace all lead service lines. Fewer than 5,000 are left to check, according to contractors. Testing has continued to show that water quality has stabilized, and residents have been encouraged to get their water tested. For a while after the tragedy, the city made water filters also available to Flint households. Free filters, replacement cartridges, and water tests were also delivered free to residents' front doors.

Adams said the replacement process is patchy, with some areas of Flint still waiting for the city to replace lead-filled pipes. She said her organization has partnered with First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church to distribute water. In addition, Black Millennials for Flint has also teamed up with Jaden Smith, the son of Will and Jada Smith, to bring The Water Box, a water filtration system to different areas of Flint.

After months of stone-walling and denials by Snyder appointees and city and state officials, Flint pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha - described by one writer as the proverbial canary in the coal mine - took the unusual step of sharing the results of the exhaustive study at a press conference. She found that the proportion of children under five in Flint with elevated lead levels in their blood nearly doubled following the city's switch to Flint River water.

Hanna-Attisha, mother of two and director of Hurley Medical Center's Pediatric Residency Program, said during a CNN interview: "We had an ethical, professional, moral responsibility to alert our community [to] what was going on ... "Our mouths were ajar, and we couldn't believe that in 2016 now, in the middle of the Great Lakes, we couldn't guarantee a population access to good drinking water."

During a press conference and according to the Detroit Free Press and other publications, Hanna-Attisha found that children in Flint who were tested exhibited elevated blood-lead levels which jumped from 2.1 percent in the 20 months prior to September 5, 2013, to 4 percent between January 1 and September 15, 2015. In certain ZIP codes, she said, the change was even more dramatic and troubling, spiking from 2.5 percent to 6.3 percent in children who were tested. The changes corresponds closely to the timing Emergency Manager Darnell Earley authorized the switch.

Flint residents are dealing with the fallout from a lead poisoning tragedy that could affect them and their children for decades. Lead is a potent neurotoxin which can cause memory loss, irreversible brain damage, impaired development, cognitive dysfunction, speech impediments and other serious chronic conditions, particularly in children. After 10 Flint residents died from Legionnaires' disease, experts said the outbreak and an uptick in infections caused by water-borne bacteria may be linked to the contamination.

As the depth of the tragedy became clear in 2016, Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards, an environmental and water resources engineer and an expert on drinking water safety, castigated state and federal officials for dereliction of duty and a callous disregard for the health and safety for those they purport to serve.

"I knew that something like Flint was inevitable because of the scientific misconduct of the EPA and the CDC, and in the wake of what happened in Washington, DC," said Edwards, who assembled a volunteer team to test water samples sent to him by concerned parent LeAnne Walters, a mother who sought answers about the tap water flowing into her home. "They falsified reports to cover up health harm [and] in the process, guaranteed that Flint was going to happen."

"I accuse them of institutional scientific misconduct. They have to be worthy of the public trust and be worthy of their mission," Edwards told the Final Call in 2016.

What's lost in much of the discussions and debates about the mess state and local officials inflicted on Flint are the larger questions about a rapidly changing job landscape; the deleterious effects on middle and lower class workers; the effects of this on towns, cities and other municipalities; and America's crumbling infrastructure.

Labor, economic, social policy and other experts argue about the importance of reshaping cities, responding in viable, creative and innovative ways to the new reality as it relates to the relationship between citizens and jobs. And at the same time, there continues to be furious exchanges in politic circles about how best to finance and maintain America's roads, bridges, electrical grid, water supplies transportation and other essential systems.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has long been a vocal critic of the federal government and Congress both for their lack of leadership and inability or unwillingness to take the appropriate action.

The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card reveals that we have made some incremental progress toward restoring our nation's infrastructure. But it has not been enough. As in 2013, America's cumulative GPA is once again a D+.

Meanwhile, political infighting in Congress has brought the notion of any consensus to a standstill and the Republican focus on the federal, state and local levels on limiting big government has manifested in the hollowing out of the middle class. In Snyder's case, that has meant privatizing city services, firing municipal employees, taking back portions of the retirement and other benefits from pensioners slashing social welfare services, all of which have eroded cities' greatest resource, its tax base.