Disaster anniversaries are often a time for reflection on how a community has recovered from terrible events. But what if very little appears to have changed? For the victims, such disaster anniversaries feel like salt rubbed into an open wound. Particularly when they near the decade mark.
One such disaster — still often referred to by many as a mere “crisis” — began eight years ago this week in Flint, Michigan. Flint victims have not yet received compensation and no one responsible has gone to jail. This is despite outrage from the many politicians and celebrities who descended on Flint to thump their fists with fury about the injustice of it all. Today, many people in Flint feel they have been forgotten. That the wheels of justice have come off the tracks.
Here’s a quick recap of what began on April 25, 2014: Officials installed by former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), attempted to save money by switching Flint’s water supply from the Great Lakes to the Flint River, which was highly corrosive water. This polluted water was not treated properly with any corrosion control measures at the city’s water plant and stripped a protective layer off the creaking lead pipe infrastructure. According to scientists, fragments of “toxic waste levels” of lead cascaded through those pipes into people’s homes. Tens of thousands of adults and children were poisoned. Additionally, there was a legionnaires’ disease outbreak — one of the worst in American history. Officially, 12 people died, but my team’s own investigation — and later others — revealed many more deaths, attributed to pneumonia, were likely caused as a result of the water switch.
Residents began protesting about their foul-smelling, discolored water. For more than a year, officials simply waved off their concerns and denied anything was wrong. I began documenting events in 2015 as residents began a city-wide citizen water test under the watchful eye of Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards, one of the nation’s leading water experts. The turning point would come later that year, when, drawing on Edwards’ data, local pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, found conclusive proof that children in Flint had been exposed to increased lead levels, after the water switch. The story then made national news.
Dr. Hanna-Attisha has continued to study the effects of the lead poisoning on Flint’s children. Her ongoing research makes for grim reading. For example, results from a recent group sample of 174 children, revealed 80 percent required help for a language learning or intellectual disorder, compared with 15 percent before the decision was made to switch the water supply.
The fact that neither state or city officials have not been held to account for what happened, despite millions of public dollars spent on a long running series of court cases, is devastating enough. Incredibly, residents have yet to receive compensation. The $600 million settlement announced last year by the state of Michigan may sound like a lot of money at first glance. But once tens of millions of dollars in legal fees are deducted, and that figure is carved up amongst Flint’s 96,000 residents, it will be far lower than many had hoped.
“This settlement is primarily directed for the youth, the kids who were at the highest risk of exposure to lead,” Attorney Trachelle Young, who has played a key role in the class-action lawsuits on behalf of residents, told me. “And so, a lot of the adults in particular, from young adults to senior citizens, are very frustrated. They believe that’s a slap in the face.”
And those settlement checks will not be dropping through letter boxes any time soon. “We are now currently in the claims process and that does not end until May,” Young said. “And after that, there’s an appeals period. And once the claims administrator decides which category people fit in, and if we don’t agree, then we can challenge that. And until all of those are resolved, checks won’t go out, which probably won’t be until towards the end of the year.”
With so many residents still refusing to drink the tap water, truckloads of donated plastic water bottles continue to arrive in Flint to be given away to residents who cannot afford to buy bottled water. Last month, at the Greater Holy Temple Church a snaking line cars stretched several blocks where residents in need of water waited from the crack of dawn.
“Right now we are still in the crisis,” volunteer Latrece Davis told me while directing vehicles, trunks open ready to receive the water. “We still have the effect of people needing water because they can’t purchase it on their own.”
Melissa Mays, a Flint residents and mother of three, helped to organize the original mass citizen water test across the city years ago. She remains skeptical in the water quality and disappointed in the response.
“We know our bodies and they told us, trust us, and then people started dying and people were damaged by seizures, all of these health problems that people have. And the fact of the matter is the water still smells bad, the water is still discolored in different areas. And also they’re only testing for lead, they’re not testing for bacteria,” she told me.
Despite the widespread lack of trust in the water, Flint residents continue pay some of the highest water bills in America.
HipHop artist Mama Sol bought a home in Flint and told me she faces an outstanding water bill of over $3,000 that had not been paid by the previous owner. “The bill stays with the property, which is strange to me because I own this house,” she said. “I might not be able to pay it and then I’ll lose property, And then they’ll turn my water off and threaten to take my child because I don’t have running water in a house with the child. Our back is against the wall in so many different ways when it comes to these water bills.”
The eighth anniversary of Flint’s water disaster is passing largely unnoticed. And that is largely because so little has changed. The damage done to so many people is hard to quantify. But as residents continue to pay for water that many of them refuse to drink, they face years of ongoing uncertainty and worry. No one really knows what the full impact of being poisoned with high levels of lead and other toxins might be.
Anthony Baxter is a documentary filmmaker and the director of the documentary “FLINT,” an up-to-date spotlight on the ongoing plight of the people of Flint, Michigan.