The water in Flint has been contaminated by lead since officials switched the source of the supply. Photo: Jake May / AP
Elected leaders don’t see water as a public resource, but as a commodity to benefit corporate interests. Poor and Black communities are paying the price.
Melissa Mays knew something was wrong in July 2014 when she and her family saw their hair falling out and they developed rashes that felt like chemical burns. That fall she started boiling their tap water because of warnings from officials in Flint, Michigan, about problems with tap water.
Months later she realized that bacteria was far from the only problem with Flint’s water, and that boiling could have increased her family’s exposure to heavy metals in the water, by concentrating some compounds and allowing them to breathe in others as steam.
After tests showed high lead levels in her three sons’ blood, Mays and her husband printed up 4,000 door hangers advising their neighbors to get blood tests. It wasn’t until months after that when state officials — whose appointed emergency manager made the decision to switch to corrosive Flint River water — finally admitted there was a problem.
Communications later showed that state and federal officials had known for some time about the state of Flint’s water, while aggressively dismissing the concerns of residents and covering up their own involvement.
Like many residents, Mays sees the debacle as part of a larger and long-standing situation in Michigan, where a web of “incestuous connections” between public officials and corporations seek to capitalize on public resources, water chief among them.
She notes that Flint’s water fund had previously been tapped to pay off other debts, and like many people she thinks the manipulation of Flint’s water supply was part of a plan to ultimately privatize the system.
“It’s profit before people,” said Mays, who moved to Flint in 2002. “They put more effort into hiding it, calling us liars and trying to shut us up and cover it up rather than fix it.”
Michigan’s Lifeblood
The waters of four different Great Lakes lap up against Michigan’s shores. State leaders have for more than a decade positioned themselves at the forefront of battles to prevent diversion of Great Lakes water out of the Great Lakes basin. And the lakes are the lure of the state’s Pure Michigan branding campaign.
Hence, it is ironic that even as Michigan jealously guards and proudly promotes its claim on the Great Lakes and their tributaries, its own largely poor and Black citizens in Flint and also Detroit have been denied the right to this same water.
The unfolding disaster in Flint is the latest and most dramatic manifestation of this trend, which has played out in other ways over more than a decade.
By law, water in Michigan is free for all to use, whether corporations or regular citizens. The infrastructure needed to deliver water is where inequity, discrimination and the profit motive enter the picture.
Flint was taken off of water supplied by the Detroit River via the Detroit water authority and switched to corrosive, polluted Flint River water in April 2014 by the appointed emergency manager overseeing the financially struggling municipality.
The move was initially widely described as a cost-saving measure. However, recently-revealed emails between government officials call that motivation into question, as it appears the Detroit authority offered a deal that would have saved Flint money in the long run. Flint was also scheduled to be moved to clean Lake Huron water by this year thanks to a pipeline being built.
Privatization Plans
So residents and watchdogs are still trying to figure out the full story behind the maneuvers, and many think that privatizing Flint’s water system was the ultimate goal.
The multi-national French water company Veolia was hired by the emergency manager and paid $900 an hour to analyze Flint’s water system last year, for a total of almost $40,000. Global Exchange describes Veolia as the “largest water privatization business in the world.”
In Detroit, Veolia was also hired to evaluate the water system, at the same time a new regional water authority was created that many saw as priming the pump for privatization.
More than 30,000 Detroit residents have had their water shut off since 2013, when the water authority began aggressively pursuing people behind on their bills and turned over enforcement to a private agency.
To rub salt in the wound, some residents were charged exorbitant bills for water that leaked or poured out of damaged pipes, often ruptured by copper theft, age, or other factors beyond the residents’ control. And since water debts are added to property tax bills, the water crisis has forced families to lose their homes to foreclosure, gutted the value of their homes, and put them at risk of having their children removed by state authorities.
Many wonder whether water infrastructure in Flint, Detroit and other cities has been allowed to degrade intentionally or tacitly in order to open the way for a private operator to take over. Similar scenarios have played out in other parts of the world; for example in El Salvador a decade ago, and famously with the “water war” in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2000.
“It’s all about money, it’s about greed, it’s a perfect example of environmental racism,” in Flint and Detroit, said Peggy Case, president of the group Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC). “This would not be happening in Traverse City where I live, it would not be happening in Bloomfield Hills or Ann Arbor.”
Flint residents pick up bottled water and water. Photo: Reuters
Bottled Water Outrage
After local and state leaders finally acknowledged that Flint’s water was undrinkable, residents were given bottled water. Mays said this is an unacceptable solution, and said the state must start redoing Flint’s pipes, immediately.
“We’re not begging for bottled water, we can’t bathe in bottled water, knock it off,” she said. “People are sick of waiting in line at a fire station for one case of bottled water. People who don’t have cars either don’t get water unless we’re delivering it from donations, or they have to ride the bus, which is $3.75 for a round trip ride to get one case that costs $3.75.”
She said residents are typically only given one case at a time, unless they have young kids, when they might get two cases. Much of the bottled water being distributed is a brand called of Ice Mountain that is bottled by Nestle Waters in Michigan.
The irony is clear. For years Case and other activists and residents fought Nestle’s attempts to expand pumping of Michigan groundwater for Ice Mountain.
Nestle was paying essentially nothing for the water, and unlike the residents of Flint it had plenty of money to pay for the infrastructure to carry the water. Under the “bottled water loophole” in the Great Lakes Compact, a package of laws forbidding diversions of Great Lakes water outside the basin, Nestle and other bottled water and beverage companies have also been allowed to send water out of the basin packaged in containers smaller than 5.7 gallons.
Ultimately citizens won a major victory when a judge curtailed Nestle’s plans for an expansion. But now the Flint debacle may be giving Nestle a sales boost, Case figures.
“Where are these big water tanker trucks that they normally bring in during emergencies?” asked Case. “They should provide free water, and Nestle shouldn’t be profiting. There are plenty of wells around still pumping good ground water here — why not fill trucks up and take that to Flint?”
Mays said her three sons, age 11, 12 and 17, are exhibiting signs of lead poisoning.
“They’re having serious struggles with bone pain, memory loss, brain fog, compromised immune systems,” she said, adding that her oldest son’s once-stellar grades have plummeted. “You see a kid who busted his butt to get where he is and now to see him sidetracked because of something someone else has done … and then the effects on little kids, it’s horrifying.”
Mays is a plaintiff in a federal class action lawsuit filed last week along with the ACLU of Michigan, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Concerned Pastors for Social Action. Mays said that a subpoena for the lawsuit should reveal Governor Rick Snyder’s communications about Flint going back to 2011.
“We want accountability and we do want charges filed on these people who were actively involved in the coverup, and that does lead up to the governor,” Mays said, reiterating her call for Snyder to revamp the city’s water infrastructure immediately. “He’s done nothing. He’s hired two PR firms instead of hiring plumbers to get this done. That’s pathetic.”
Water Wars
The crises in Flint and Detroit have created wide-ranging solidarity and awareness of the concept of water as an environmental justice and health issue and a contested element of the public domain.
The Detroit Water Brigade has coordinated grassroots efforts to collect and share water and resist shutoffs in that city; volunteers from around the state, country, and Canada have pitched in to help provide Flint and Detroit residents with clean water; and regular citizens like Mays in Flint continue their fight to reveal how officials caused and tried to cover up the crisis. Meanwhile, activists in Michigan and beyond are connecting the Detroit and Flint situations to larger water struggles.
Environmentalists say that in recent years, especially under Snyder’s administration, the state has not only viciously denied water to poor minority residents but also endangered the state’s water resources by its support of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and its inaction on an aging oil pipeline running through the delicate Straits of Mackinac.
Mays notes that the wife of Snyder’s former chief of staff, lobbyist and publicist Deborah Muchmore, has worked extensively for both Nestle and the Michigan Oil and Gas Association and its members.
Jim Olson was the attorney leading the fight against Ice Mountain’s expansion and he is co-founder of the organization FLOW (For Love of Water). He said the state government has developed a “callous disregard” for the idea of water as a public good and necessity.
“The risk to the Straits of Mackinac, the risk to the people of Detroit, the situation in Flint — all of it points to a breach of this public trust,” said Olson. “We’ve moved away from looking at water as an important substance for life and centered more on this culture of cost and corporate mentality governing things that never should have been governed that way. Water isn’t a question of the bottom line, it’s a question of health and sustenance.”
This content was originally published by teleSUR.
◊
Kari Lydersen is the author of Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99% (Haymarket Books, 2013). She is a long-time Chicago journalist and journalism instructor and co-director of the Social Justice News Nexus fellowship program at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
♦