FLINT, Mich. — The longest line at Freeman Elementary School’s Family Fun Night was not for face painting or food. It was for lead testing.
For three months, families in the former auto manufacturing hub of Flint have taken their children for blood tests and lived on bottled water after doctors found high levels of lead in the bodies of the community’s youngest people.
“It really is a scary situation to know that we can’t get clean drinking water,” said Sherri Miller, who brought her first-grade son, Jameer, to have a finger-prick blood sample tested. “It really is scary to think someone knew about this” and did nothing.
Nearly two years have passed since safe drinking water flowed from Flint faucets. The financially troubled city began drawing its water from the Flint River in 2014 to save money. Officials failed to treat the corrosive water properly to prevent metal leaching from old pipes. Worse, residents didn’t learn they were drinking tainted water until the state issued warnings a year and a half after the switch was made.
For the city’s 100,000 residents, daily life is now all about lead.
Before the crisis, Flint, about an hour’s drive north of Detroit, had become a symbol of the decline of the U.S. auto industry, having suffered waves of auto plant layoffs and the loss of half its population. Forty-one percent of the population falls below the poverty line.
These days, it’s a place where parents fear for the health of young children, who can develop learning disabilities and behavior problems from lead exposure.
“It has such damning, lifelong and generational consequences,” said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of pediatric residency at Hurley Children’s Hospital, where more than 2,000 children have been tested. She is credited with bringing the problem to the public’s attention after state agencies initially dismissed her concerns.
“It was frustrating that it went on for so long,” Hanna-Attisha said, complaining that even since the state began taking action, “everything has been slow.”
Gov. Rick Snyder finally acknowledged in late September that the water was unsafe, saying the consequences of switching to Flint River water were not “fully understood.” The decision to use the river was made while a Snyder-appointed emergency manager was running city government.
The city, which had been under state supervision since 2011, returned to local control last April.
Flint went back to Detroit water in October, but some fear the old pipes were so damaged that they must be replaced, at costs estimated as high as $1.5 billion.
On Monday, Snyder apologized to Flint and pledged that officials would contact every household to ensure families have bottled water and a filter and to check whether they want to be tested for lead exposure.
He also promised to seek a long-term solution.
“This is a crisis,” the governor said. “So we’re responding appropriately. There’s more work to be done.”
Snyder’s many critics got louder at midweek, when the governor announced that two spikes in Legionnaires’ disease had occurred in the county that includes Flint during the time Flint River water was used. Ten people died. Michigan health officials said they cannot conclude that the outbreak stemmed from Flint’s water, but others argued it probably had.
