Background on the Flint Water Crisis

The Flint Water Crisis is an ongoing public health disaster in Flint, Michigan that began in 2014 when the city temporarily switched to a new water source. The decision to switch was made by state officials who had been assigned control of the city, and it created deadly water quality issues that are still being dealt with today. 

The archive associated with this website is important because information and evidence has been crucial to this larger story. We likely only know of this event as a crisis because Flint residents successfully brought the world’s attention to their contaminated water, over the dismissals and denials of state and federal officials. State officials turned out to be misdirecting the public and media about the causes, consequences, and even the very existence of the crisis. 

But since then, and despite continued efforts by Flint residents, the story of Flint’s crisis has become increasingly limited in scope. From the outside, it can seem like the only questions left to ask are ones like “Is Flint’s water fixed yet?” and “Is the crisis over?” But there are still many questions left unanswered about the crisis. Perhaps the most important among them is why the Flint Water Crisis happened. Answering this question requires retelling the story of Flint’s crisis. That story begins with Flint’s water, but it also includes topics like infrastructure funding, citizen-led activism and science, pending lawsuits, and democracy itself. The email archive, which has still not been fully explored, has insights that help explain much of this larger story. 

What happened to Flint’s water?

For 50 years, beginning in the 1960s, Flint was a customer of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). Under this arrangement, Flint bought pre-treated water from DWSD, meaning the city was not responsible for making the water “potable” (safe for drinking) before piping it into the homes of Flint residents. However, on April 25, 2014, the City of Flint stopped using DWSD as its water source and switched to a new one: the Flint River.

The Flint River was intended to be an interim water source while the city awaited the creation of a new pipeline and a new regional water authority: the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA). The KWA’s formation was a partnership with Genesee County, where Flint is the county seat. While waiting for the KWA to be ready, state-appointed emergency managers running the city directed Flint to use its old treatment plant to treat and provide river water from the Flint River to residents. (In the meantime, Genesee County continued using safe DWSD water.) Flint’s water treatment plant had not been in full service since 1967, when the city first left the Flint River to join DWSD, in part because the river water was known to be contaminated by industry. 

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Flint’s river water was more corrosive and difficult to treat, but the plant was not given the upgrades it needed to treat the water properly. Additionally, state officials opted not to mandate any corrosion control measures. As a result, water from the Flint River started corroding Flint’s pipes, including lead service lines. Sent through an already-fragile water system, the river water ate through the protective biofilm layer within Flint’s lead and cast iron pipes before beginning to dissolve the pipes themselves. As state regulators admitted by email, efforts to alleviate the problem by flushing water mains sometimes made the situation even worse by sending built-up sediment and biofilm to new parts of the system. Once there, lead and other corroded material could readhere to more pipes, meaning that even pipes not made of lead wound up lead-contaminated.

By early 2015, lead levels in water samples taken in some residents’ homes were far above federal standards of 15 parts per billion (although no level of lead is safe). Staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), charged with setting these regulations, expressed concern to state officials over email, with one EPA employee summarizing the results of a Feb. 2015 lead test at LeeAnne Walters’ home this way: “WOW!!!! Did he find LEAD!” But the city’s testing for lead in water used methods that underestimated exposure to lead, keeping the city’s overall numbers technically below the allowed limit. 

-In summer 2015, residents conducted independent tests of water in households, working with a Virginia Tech team of researchers, showing levels exceeding the city’s results. Another researcher, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, conducted a study of children’s blood lead levels that found rates of children under 5 with elevated lead in their blood had doubled during Flint’s time on the water. Lead is linked to numerous health issues in humans, and the harms from lead poisoning can take decades to fully unfold. Since the water switch, Flint children have experienced a steep drop in reading and math scores and a rise in special education rates. Flint residents also experienced an increase in miscarriage and stillbirth rates following the switch to the Flint River (lead has long been known to harm reproductive health). 

While much of the national attention on Flint focused on lead, the Flint Water Crisis encompassed much more than lead-in-water issues alone. Flint residents also experienced multiple boil advisories due to e. Coli and total coliform bacteria contamination; a Safe Drinking Water Act violation due to carcinogenic total trihalomethanes (TTHMs); and one of the worst Legionnaires’ Disease outbreaks in US history. A Frontline documentary tracked at least 70 previously misdiagnosed Legionnaires’ cases, but noted that these cases were still probably undercounted. Preliminary studies have also shown increased rates of cancer in Flint. Many residents struggle with crisis-related health problems to this day, and boil advisories have been issued as recently as July of 2023.

Given the nature of Flint’s water system and its history of environmental contamination, we are unlikely to ever get a full accounting of the contaminants to which residents were exposed or the health outcomes that followed. Moreover, Flint residents have also suffered psychological and economic effects from the inability to use their drinking water, which are likewise difficult to fully account for.

While the full extent of health effects is unknown, it is important to note that water quality issues were immediately observed and reported by Flint residents, but officials publicly denied these reports while they spoke about the unfolding crisis behind closed doors. Many of the stories told about Flint’s water crisis focus on the water itself. But understanding the role of officials and the decision-making that created the crisis is just as important.

What happened to Flint’s democracy?

 “They could not have taken our water away without taking our democracy first.”

– Claire McClinton (Inequality.org)

During key decision-making points before and during its water crisis, the City of Flint was under the control of a state-appointed employee called an emergency manager. Under Michigan’s Emergency Manager law, unelected emergency managers were given near-total control over every aspect of their assigned city’s decision-making, especially after 2011, when newly-elected Governor Rick Snyder signed Public Act 4 (PA 4) into law. Emergency management was imposed almost exclusively on majority-black cities, meaning that by 2013, half of Michigan’s black residents had no local democracy (compared to less than three percent of the white population). Flint’s first emergency manager, Michael Brown, was appointed in late November 2011, stripping local democratic processes of any practical authority. This means that emergency managers, not local elected officials, were responsible for many of the decisions that led to the Flint Water Crisis. Flint would remain under the control of an emergency manager until April 2015.

Less than a year into Flint’s emergency management, local union members, activist groups and other Flint residents worked with grassroots organizations across Michigan to successfully vote down PA 4 in a 2012 state-wide ballot referendum. The results of the referendum should have freed Flint, and the other cities then under emergency management, from receivership. However, only one month after PA 4 was repealed, Governor Snyder signed PA 436 into law, a  new, nearly-identical version of the act that could not be voted out. 

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While April 25, 2014 is remembered as the official date of Flint’s water switch, the decision to use Flint River water was made after years of prior discussion. Evidence from the email archive shows how Flint’s emergency managers worked methodically to put Flint on the river, beginning before it was publicly announced that Flint would join the KWA. For example, as early as April 17, 2013, emergency manager Ed Kurtz started telling State Treasury officials about plans to meet “with city staff to get [the Flint Water Treatment Plant] up to treating Lake Huron and river water.”

Flint residents were left with little information about this transition, and what information they were given was often misleading or plainly false. With local democracy suspended, Flint residents were denied the ability to decide the future of their own water supply. However, they still found ways to make their voices heard, even as state and federal government officials denied the crisis and delayed a proper response.

How did Flint residents respond to the crisis?

The decision to begin distributing treated water from the Flint River to residents in April 2014 had been criticized by some residents and experts, including a water treatment plant operator who infamously warned, “If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple of weeks, it will be against my direction.” Within a month, Flint residents were reporting changes in water taste, color, and odor that persisted despite assurances from city and state officials that the water quality had not changed.

Residents’ reports were not just “complaints,” as they were sometimes described by officials. Rather, residents were making the kinds of observations that are essential to tracking water safety, and documented the fallout from a new water source’s interaction with an old water system. The “citizen science” that residents engaged in by collecting water samples provided critical evidence for holding officials accountable. However, it was not until residents’ findings were backed-up by professional scientists that they were finally given credibility.

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Flint has a long history of activism and community organization, dating back to the historic 1936 sit-down strike. The strike established the United Auto Workers as a union capable of winning against an industry giant like General Motors. While Flint’s union presence has diminished since General Motors’ exit, new social organizations like the Flint Democracy Defense League emerged to fight emergency management legislation, and they became key figures as the water crisis progressed. Likewise, it was advocacy by Flint residents that brought national and international attention to the Water Crisis. Residents united to share information, distribute water and water filters, and advocate for their community. They were supported by the mobilization of community groups across Michigan, the United States, and from around the world. This grassroots support came even as Flint residents were denied a proper response from their own government.

How did the government respond to the crisis?

State Response

Many explanations of Flint’s water crisis have focused on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) decision not to require corrosion control as part of the city’s water treatment process (and its failure to disclose this fact until August 2015). That explanation provides a simple, “technical” diagnosis of Flint’s water contamination, but does not encompass the many other problems with Flint’s water system — or the fact that many of these problems were predictable. (For a critique of the “technical” narrative, see Ben Pauli’s Flint Fights Back.) The email record shows that the state had a much broader role in triggering and exacerbating the crisis, a role which this archive aims to document.

Despite growing evidence that residents of Flint were experiencing adverse health effects from changes in water quality, state officials continued to state publicly that Flint’s water met “all standards for drinking water” and to tell Flint residents to “relax.” Internally, state officials discussed grave concerns with Flint’s water quality, tying these concerns to the use of river water. They were especially concerned when General Motors announced in October 2014 that it would discontinue using Flint river water for its engine plant, as the water was corroding its engine parts.

Although these state officials in the Department of Treasury and Governor Snyder’s office internally discussed Flint returning to Detroit water multiple times, they publicly maintained the position that Flint’s water was safe. Later, state and local officials were found to have been manipulating already-lax sampling procedures to minimize lead findings, ignoring or misrepresenting Flint’s lack of corrosion control in its water treatment process, and delaying or refusing to provide information to officials asking questions about Flint’s water switch, water quality, and health outcomes.

Some state officials’ actions also indicated that they understood the water problems were serious. Michigan started trucking in water for their own employees working in a state building in Flint in January 2015. The next month, Governor Snyder’s advisors started to quietly plan to support churches in distributing water filters to Flint residents, which they did, though anonymously. 

In February 2015, the state and Flint worked with international water company Veolia to inspect Flint’s water quality. The same week its contract was announced, Veolia employees on the team conducting the review emailed one another their concerns about high lead levels and noted that Flint would be safer if they returned to Detroit water. But these concerns were not included in Veolia’s report — instead, they removed a draft report’s mention of lead and claimed that Flint’s water was “safe.”

The state’s resistance continued until the end of September 2015, when outside experts provided evidence of high amounts of lead in water in residents’ homes and elevated levels of lead in childrens’ blood. The state shifted its stance in early October, acknowledging the water was not safe, and authorized Flint to return to water from Detroit’s system on October 17, 2015 — a year and a half after the crisis began.

On October 21, 2015, the state commissioned a Task Force that investigated “the contamination of the Flint water supply.” On January 13, 2016, Governor Snyder declared a state of emergency in Genesee County. In its March 2016 report, the task force held Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality primarily responsible for the decision-making that led to the crisis. 

In response to the EPA’s 2016 Emergency Order issued against Flint and Michigan, the state became responsible for executing much of the recovery initiatives, from distributing federal crisis funds to overseeing bottled water and filter distribution. The state Attorney General also oversaw criminal cases against individuals charged for their roles in the crisis (until they were overturned), while the state has simultaneously managed civil lawsuits brought against itself by Flint residents for its own role in the crisis.

Federal response

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was involved early in the water crisis, but their mishandling of early warning signs meant it took months before they actually responded. The EPA began receiving complaints about water quality issues from Flint residents as early as May of 2014, less than a month after the switch to the Flint River. The EPA did not preserve most of these complaints, although many were forwarded on and saved in the email archives. [hyperlink to About the Email Archive] Here, officials sometimes expressed a startling lack of concern in handling residents’ complaints. In 2018, the Office of the Inspector General issued a report finding that the EPA’s shortcomings played a significant role in delaying the federal government’s response to the Flint Water Crisis. Rather than ensuring the MDEQ was properly enforcing the drinking water standards in Flint, the EPA lacked an “effective risk assessment system” that could have enabled them to act sooner. As we’ll discuss later, this delayed response ended up being used as grounds for lawsuits against the EPA by Flint residents, one of several ongoing suits related to the crisis.

Although it was delayed, the EPA ultimately did respond to the situation in Flint. However, their response came only after their own employee, Miguel Del Toral, leaked a draft report on June 24, 2015, finding elevated lead levels and a lack of corrosion control measures in Flint’s water system. As Gov. Snyder was creating the state Task Force, the EPA issued an emergency order requiring Flint and the state to take multiple actions to protect residents’ health. These actions ranged from creating a website for posting compliance updates to submitting a plan for daily water quality monitoring, and required the preservation of all materials relating to the order.

 

In March of 2017, Congress allocated $100 million in Federal WIIN funding through the MDEQ to “enable Flint to accelerate and expand its work to replace lead service lines and make other critical infrastructure improvements.” Twenty million dollars of this funding ultimately went toward lead service line replacement in Flint neighborhoods. 

Litigation

There have been multiple state-level attempts at prosecuting officials responsible for the water crisis, but most of the charges have since been dropped. (In early January 2016, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Michigan/ Department of Justice announced it too was looking into the crisis, although it is not clear how or whether that investigation progressed.)

A total of fifteen state and local officials involved in the water crisis were criminally charged in 2016 for crimes ranging from manslaughter to conspiracy. In 2019, the investigative team appointed by new state Attorney General Dana Nessel threw out remaining charges, declaring that the investigations were compromised and needed to be restarted from scratch. In 2021, the office reinstated criminal charges — aside from those alleging financial crimes — and added several new defendants, including Governor Snyder himself and his advisor Rich Baird. However, in Summer 2022 Michigan’s Supreme Court took issue with the fact that these charges were issued by a one-man grand jury, and the court ultimately dismissed the remaining charges. It is unlikely that these charges can be refiled due to Michigan’s statutes of limitations on misdemeanors and felonies. In addition, a new team would have to begin investigations all over again before charges could be refiled.

“It’s a Band-Aid on a bullet wound once again for our city that is still coping with the residual effects of the water crisis.”

• LuLu Brezzell (MLive)

Is the crisis over?

Many people want to know if Flint’s water is now safe to drink or whether Flint’s crisis is “over,” but both of these questions have complex answers. By official measures, Flint’s lead levels have declined to acceptable levels according to the Lead and Copper Rule, but the city is still experiencing variations in water quality, including multiple boil advisories in 2023 alone. From past experience with cities’ lead line replacement, experts have said that the process, while important, can lead to temporary spikes in lead in water until replacement is complete. In early 2024, the City of Flint was found in contempt of court for failing to meet deadlines set regarding lead service line replacements. Several lawsuits are still underway and the state has yet to pay its settlement to Flint, meaning the crisis is still playing out in court as much as it is in Flint’s water system. Flint residents, as the ones harmed directly by the water crisis, also have their own ideas about what it would take for the crisis to be “over,” many of which extend beyond water alone and connect the crisis to a larger picture of inequity. (For example, the Flint Democracy Defense League has created a list of demands for justice regarding the crisis.)

[Maybe include a screenshot or inset (somehow) of the list of demands here?]

State Settlement

In August 2020, Michigan announced a $626 million settlement with Flint residents.  This settlement, the “Master Settlement Agreement,” resolved multiple civil lawsuits against the city of Flint, Michigan, Rowe Engineering and MacLaren Hospital. It promised that 80% of the funds would be reserved for children, and that it would be paid out based on the level of harm received by a given resident. While the settlement was the largest in Michigan’s history, many residents and local organizations feel that it falls well short of full remediation. As of the end of 2024, this settlement has not yet been paid out.

“How do you put a price tag on your kids’ brains, bones and futures?”

• Melissa Mays (Huffpost)

Ongoing Lawsuits

Civil lawsuits were filed against three water contractors that had provided advice to Flint during the crisis: Rowe Engineering, Veolia North America (a subsidiary of the French company Veolia), and LAN (Lockwood, Andrews and Newnam). Unlike Rowe, Veolia and LAN declined to join the Master Settlement Agreement negotiated by the state in 2020.

LAN and Veolia’s first trial, brought by four plaintiffs who were children under six during the water crisis, resulted in a mistrial in August 2022. LAN agreed to settle in 2023. In February 2024, Veolia announced an offer to settle a separate class action lawsuit with property owners for $25 million, two weeks before the case was set to move to trial. In March 2024, the state announced Veolia had settled its lawsuit and agreed to contribute $53 million to the state’s larger settlement.

Lawsuits have also been brought against the EPA, including Burgess v United States in 2016, which claimed negligence and a slow response to the crisis from the EPA, as well as Walters v City of Flint, which similarly claimed that “Flint’s water crisis was compounded by the EPA’s slow and ineffective response.”

Additionally, a 2020 lawsuit brought by Flint residents claimed the three banks underwriting Flint’s KWA bond shared culpability for Flint’s water crisis. The plaintiffs alleged the bond’s underwriters knew Flint River water quality was compromised, and that Flint had neither time nor money to renovate its plan to use this water safely within the time frame laid out in bond documents. While this lawsuit has been dismissed, it has raised important questions about how the KWA bond relates to Flint’s switch to the Flint River. 

Why did the Flint Water Crisis happen?

“…it was about them making money, not saving money.”

• Art Woodson (The Detroit News)

Flint residents still want to know why the water switch happened. This archive provides essential context to illustrate the decision-making that went into Flint’s water switch, and why state officials refused for so long to allow the city to return to the water source they knew was safer. These records, especially in official emails [hyperlink to the email search tool], also help illustrate the connections between Flint’s temporary switch to the river and emergency managers’ decision for Flint to join the newly formed Karegnondi Water Authority long term.

Very few accounts have attempted to fully connect Flint’s crisis to the creation of the Karegnondi Water Authority, which was supposed to become Flint’s long-term water source after using the Flint River as a placeholder. Even the state’s own official Task Force investigating the crisis concluded there was much more to be known about how this disaster came to occur, and noted that “the specific attributes of the decisions related to KWA warrant investigative review.”

The KWA was not only an infrastructural project, but a financial project. The bonds used to finance the construction of the KWA pipeline expand the scope of the Flint Water Crisis by showing how entities outside of Flint were invested in the future of their water. KWA was a new raw water source with a new pipeline bringing water from Lake Huron to Flint and Genesee County, and funding the new pipeline required a large bond. Because Flint was under emergency management, the state was in charge of Flint’s joining this new water system, and the state made all the decisions that joining entailed. State officials rationalized that joining the KWA might save money long term, although it involved substantial new debt for a city in a “financial emergency.” State officials also oversaw Flint’s switch to the Flint River as an interim water source before the KWA became operational. This decision was not incidental to the larger project: language in the KWA bond specified both that Flint would change water sources to the river and the date it would happen (before Flint’s water plant was ready for the switch).

We still lack a full understanding of who else may have been involved in the decision for Flint to use the river. Testimony given in 2016 by Professor Peter Hammer from the state’s Civil Rights Commission raised questions about how Flint was made eligible to participate in the KWA bond, and how that process connected to Flint’s water switch. Hammer referenced the DEQ’s early 2014 agreement to write a pretextual environmental order that provided the loophole for Flint to borrow money for the KWA project and evade its debt limit. Language in this environmental order required Flint to join the KWA, and to use the Flint River in the meantime.

More research is needed to understand what has happened to the City of Flint’s control over its water. While the Flint River was supposed to be a placeholder for the Karegnondi Water Authority, Flint has never received KWA water. In a 2017 deal achieved under significant pressure from the state, including a lawsuit from the state Department of Environmental Quality, Flint’s city council agreed to continue paying the KWA water bond while committing to a 30 year contract with the new water authority that took over Detroit’s extended water system. In exchange for that new authority’s help paying its KWA bond obligation, the agreement required Flint to “irrevocably” forfeit its rights to KWA water.

This archive [link to The Flint Water Crisis Public Archive] provides essential context to illustrate the decisions that went into Flint’s water switch. These records illustrate the connections between Flint’s temporary switch to the river and emergency managers’ decision for Flint to join the newly-formed Karegnondi Water Authority long term. This behind-the-scenes evidence shows that Flint officials were deliberately manipulating the crisis narrative as it was happening.

The email archive [link to About The Email Archive] is derived largely from state officials’ communications as they made decisions, managed information, and shaped first drafts of those narratives. Tracking the evolution of these narratives helps show the extent of that misdirection. Moreover, many of those same people participated in earlier decisions that put Flint in this situation in the first place. The early manipulation of this story has not been helped by its oversimplification ever since. A full accounting of the disaster requires revisiting the bigger picture.

For more reading, please consult the Additional Resources [link to Additional Resources]