It had been five months since her tap water turned brown, since her skin broke out in a furious rash, since Zion, her nine-year-old daughter, complained that the smell of the water made her sick. Shea, 32, clamped her mouth shut in the shower and barred Zion from drinking from school water fountains. She used bottled water to brush their teeth. She made her mother, Renée, 55, promise to swear off tap water, too. Even so, Renée noticed her hair was falling out. It had been thinning for months. But now it was coming off in clumps. She obsessed over it-they were so careful. Finally, it clicked. Renée worked for General Motors. She drank coffee every day, sipping it to stay alert during the punishing third shift. It was brewed with water from Flint. Shea and Zion were born and raised in Flint. Renée has lived there since she was a kid. Like so many Rust Belt cities, Flint has been hollowed out by economic change.
But the Cobbs have stuck with it, watching it become a twenty-first century ghost town. A writer for The Detroit News described Flint in 1983 as a place in which "there are so few people about that you might think the neutron bomb had hit." But to these three generations of women, it's home. When I visited these women over this past winter and spring, to learn about how one family endured the water crisis, they stressed that to me. Flint was family. Family was Flint-until now. This is the story of how a town loses a family and a family loses a town. In 2013, the Flint City Council voted to leave the expensive Detroit water system and contract with the still-incomplete Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), a water-distribution corporation. But while the city waited to join the KWA, Flint would need an interim water source. In June, state-appointed emergency manager Ed Kurtz ruled that Flint would start to draw water from the 78.3-mile Flint River, which flows from Lapeer County into the Saginaw Bay.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder had awarded Kurtz the job the year before in his latest bid to reverse Flint's financial downturn. The autumn before the switch to Flint River water, Flint had a $19 million deficit. Using the Flint River would save the city about $5 million over the course of two years. Officials promised that Flint residents-mostly black and 40 percent poor-wouldn't even notice the difference. On April 25, 2014, Flint's mayor, Dayne Walling, invited about a dozen people to join him at a small water treatment plant to commemorate what he deemed a "historic moment." The switch would let Flint "return to its roots," Walling said. Someone started a countdown. A pitcher and plastic cups materialized. Officials raised their cups of Flint River water and toasted: "Here's to Flint." At zero, the mayor pressed a small black button, which turned off the flow from Detroit. Within weeks, the complaints streamed in.
The water tasted rancid. It stank. Across the city, people were breaking out in hives and rashes. Their hair had started to fall out-eyelashes, too. Mostly ensconced in wealthier suburbs like Flushing and Grand Blanc, which drew water from a different source, officials insisted the water in Flint was fine to drink. Mayor Walling said that month. Shea used to hear rumors about the Flint River. It could turn your skin blue or make you grow an extra toe, people said. Some kids whispered that dead bodies rotted below the surface. It was toxic, a decades-old dump site for waste and chemicals. In the 1930s, when thousands of fish died at once, shoedrop.shop a lab determined that pollution had so deoxygenated the water that the fish had suffocated to death. Flint passed a series of ordinances in the 1950s and 1960s to try to decontaminate the water, but the efforts suffered setbacks.
In 1974, researchers discovered that a local wastewater plant had been oozing raw sewage into the river for decades. In 1999, when Shea was 15, a 72-inch pipe that connected sewers to the Flint Waste Treatment Plant was accidentally slashed open. By the time workers stopped the flow, 22 million gallons of human, industrial, and commercial waste had flowed into the river. For the next 14 months, health officials forbade swimming, fishing, or even coming into direct contact with the river. Four months after officials opened the city's taps to Flint River water, tests detected traces of E. coli in the water. The bacterium can cause diarrhea, stomachaches, headaches, and nausea. But it poses a more serious risk to children and the infirm, threatening organ failure and other grave health problems. Officials issued water-boil advisories and promised to fine-tune the chemical mixture they had been using to treat the water. The pipes were flooded with chlorine. A rticle has been creat ed by G SA Con te nt G ener ator Dem oversion!