Detection of lead and conflicting messages about safety
The DWSD offered to reconnect Flint to its system, but Flint’s emergency manager declined, and communications within Snyder’s administration revealed that cost remained the primary decision driver as public health concerns began to mount. Later that month, dangerous levels of lead were detected in two water fountains on the University of Michigan–Flint campus. In January 2015 the city informed residents that elevated levels of carcinogenic trihalomethanes had been detected in Flint’s water but insisted that it remained safe to drink. A spike in the incidence of Legionnaire disease in Flint led Genesee county health officials to question whether the outbreak might be connected to contamination of the water supply, but attempts to investigate the matter were met with resistance at the city and state level. Over the following months, residents were twice advised to boil water because of the presence of dangerous levels of bacteria, and General Motors announced that the use of Flint River water at its plant was causing corrosion on newly machined engine parts. Solving the critical environmental problems of global warming, water scarcity, pollution, and biodiversity loss are perhaps the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Human action has triggered a vast cascade of environmental problems that now threaten the continued ability of both natural and human systems to flourish. That change was made in April 2014, and residents immediately registered their concerns about water quality. Those managers, who reported directly to the Michigan state treasury department and not to the citizens of Flint, decided to switch the city’s water supply from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to the Flint River as a cost-savings measure.
Rick Snyder appointed the first of a series of unelected emergency managers to run the city. The city’s financial doldrums continued, however, and in 2011 Michigan Gov. John Engler declared a state of financial emergency in the city, and for the next two years, executive power in Flint was wielded by a manager selected by Engler. The creation of a crisisĪlthough it was once a thriving industrial centre, the city of Flint, in southeastern Michigan, struggled economically following the closing of several General Motors automobile manufacturing plants in the 1980s and ’90s. Tens of thousands of Flint residents were exposed to dangerous levels of lead, and outbreaks of Legionnaire disease killed at least 12 people and sickened dozens more.
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