Running out of hot water for showers is bad, but poisoned drinking water is worse.
Flint, Mich., home to nearly 100,000 people has been known for its high crime rates, and was even ranked among the “Most Dangerous Cities in the United States." Now it’s also known for its water.
In April 2014, Flint decided to switch its water source from treated Lake Huron water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. Flint hadn't switched its water supplier in 50 years, and officials were looking for a way to save nearly $5 million in less than two years.
When Darnell Earley, emergency manager of Flint, signed off on the proposal, the deal was set.
Not long after the initial switch, members of Flint noticed that their tap water looked and smelled different. At first they didn't know, but soon realized their water was contaminated with lead.
Through attempts to correct the problem in October 2015, Flint switched its water supplier back to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. However, the damage had already been done, and the old pipes were continuing to leach lead.
President Barack Obama issued a state of emergency in mid-January 2016 for the city of Flint after the issue came into the national spotlight.
One of the more severely affected populations exposed to the issue in Flint was the city's children.
A doctor at Hurley Medical Center in Flint reported results from one of her studies in September 2015 that showed elevated levels of lead in infants and children in the area. There has also been a spike in cases of Legionella bacteria, which has caused 10 fatalities among 87 cases as of mid-January 2016.
“Lead within water is not a common and it doesn’t usually present itself in terms of lead levels within children," said Stu Schmitz, toxicologist at the Iowa Department of Public Health.
Schmitz did however cite lead issues in older homes that have lead piping within the service line that enters the home.
The most common way for children to be exposed to lead is through lead-based paint, Schmitz said.
“The paint that’s in the home that might be chipping on window sills or other parts of the home can become part of the dust within the home,” he said.
Schmitz also said lead paint on the outside of houses can become a problem because as it chips from the foundation it gets in the way of the drip line and in turn seeps into the soil.
Schmitz said adverse health impacts are not always readily seen in children. The only real way to know if a child has elevated lead levels is to have their blood tested.
However, common symptoms for lead poisoning among children include irritability and delayed reaction times.
“Elevated levels of lead can cause some cognitive problems, learning disabilities and it has an impact on the central nervous system within the brain that can cause some problems that can lower IQ,” Schmitz said.
Adults may experience irritability and confusion.
Since children are constantly growing, the impact lead has on them is far greater than that of an adult.
“A level of 10 micrograms per deciliter we consider to be elevated; greater than 70 micrograms per deciliter [is fatal].”
Kristie Franz, associate professor of geological and atmospheric sciences, said she can’t fathom what it would be like to have a child suffering from lead poisoning.
“I can’t imagine as a parent how horrific it would be to realize that your child had just been exposed to a really hazardous substance,” she said.
As this water quality issue continues to persist in Flint, it’s important to understand where the problem started.
A simple water test could have uncovered the problem before it became a problem for Flint.
"[If the water is] above an action level that the EPA has, then it becomes an issue that they need to investigate further,” Schmitz said.
Flint River also contains a high level of chlorides.
A study by researchers from Virginia Tech showed the Flint River being 19 times more corrosive than Lake Huron because of the higher chloride concentration.
"[They’re most likely there from] industrial contaminants that are probably not being released in large concentrations into the waterway but could be left over in sediments or they could be leaching through the groundwater," Franz said.
The Flint River has dealt with being highly polluted from industrial activity for decades.
“If you think of what’s feeding the Flint River, it’s really that whole watershed that the river sits in," Franz said. "In order to understand why the quality of the Flint River is as bad as it is you need to look out in the landscape and figure out what are the sources of the contaminant reaching the river.”
Franz suggests that the contaminants in the sediments may be in the stream bed.
“Some of it might still be washing in from the land; it could be in the groundwater system.”
As many others have, Franz acknowledges that there should be some type of cleanup somewhere within these systems to try and improve the quality of the water.
However, as an immediate fix, Franz has a couple different suggestions.
The first is to incorporate water filters into households. However, some negatives with the scenario include the short life span of filters and the possibility that the water may be too contaminated with heavy metals that the filter can’t clean it, thus leaking the metals back into the water.
Another problem is that multiple filters have to be used in order to supply each bathroom or kitchen with clean water, which becomes costly.
Reverse osmosis is also a viable option, forcing water through small membranes that will remove nearly every contaminant in the water to the point where minerals are nonexistent.
The overall solution to Flint's leaching pipes problem is to replace all of the water lines. Although an expensive solution, the decaying of Flint’s old pipes needs to be corrected.
Traditionally, almost all water delivery systems used to use lead pipes because of their malleability, Franz said.
Since the Flint has been using the same pipe systems since at least the 1960s, the pipes were bound to cause issues at some point. It wasn't until people learned about the effects of lead in the human body when cities began to replace lead pipe systems. Because of the expense, Flint didn't convert to a different system of pipes.
“It comes down to whether it’s worth spending the money to clean up the river, or whether it should be done on the delivery side," Franz said.
However, a fix now isn't enough in her eyes. The problems are not just in the pipes, but in the people and government.
“That’s just unbelievable in this day and age that somebody wouldn’t have done a proper assessment and laid it all out and said, 'If you're going to make this switch, this is what you absolutely have to do,'" Franz said in regard to the controversy. "It should have just never happened."
Franz is also participating in a study called "Water and Climate Change (WACC): Building a Community Consensus for a Sustainable Future for Iowa and the World." Through this study, the team of researchers expects to provide options for communities across the world to improve their water management practices to be more sustainable.
They're trying to find solutions for lack of water, too much water or water of degraded quality. The solutions they come up with primarily start with community-level efforts that integrate sound science with local needs and values.
“We’re building a model of a watershed where you have people making decisions and then you have a natural system," Franz said. "The way the two interact determines how the natural system behaves and then the effect of the natural system will be on the people living there."
One thing Franz acknowledges as a key component of the study is the need to engage people who actually live in the community in the development of their model.
“The reason we’re engaging stakeholders is so that we can make the research more meaningful,” she said.
When relating this study to Flint, Franz said it’s important to involve the community members in the process of restoring the water, whether they get involved in the science aspect or simply help make proactive decisions on how to fix the problem.
One problem Franz sees with the way things are being handled in Flint is the lack of involvement between the city managers and community members.
“People who live [in Flint] were basically taken out of the process entirely," she said. "They had an emergency manager that was not elected, they had no role in deciding whether to keep using the Lake Huron or the Detroit water or whether to go to their local source."
Franz cites this act of exclusion by the emergency manager to be the reason for the lack of distrust toward the government by the people of Flint. Engaging people early on in these types of water issues will ultimately give people a better sense of the problems at hand and help them make better decisions.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder delivered a budget presentation to the state legislature Feb. 10 that addressed long-term plans he proposes will help the people of Flint.