A month ago, the water situation in Flint, Michigan dominated the news. A couple of years ago, in an effort to save costs, the city administrator switched the water supply from Detroit Water to the Flint River. River water isn’t quite as clean as that from the city of Detroit and corrosives in the water ate away at the coating inside the hundred year old Flint water pipes, releasing lead and other poisons into the city’s potable water system.
To make matters worse (is that possible?), the tap water looked filthy and contaminated. For months, residents showed up at city commission meetings with bottles of dirty water drawn from their kitchen taps to complain. Repeatedly, they were told that the water tested fine and to just run the tap a little longer to clear the contaminants. Essentially, government agencies “whistled past the graveyard.”
The result of this fiasco is that children have been exposed to dangerous levels of lead; other diseases are being blamed on the contaminated water system; the cost of replacing the ancient, corroded water pipes will be astronomical and finger-pointing abounds.
Flint is an aging industrial city, well past its prime. The city boasts a population of about a hundred thousand, less than half what it was 20 years ago. Unemployment is significantly higher than both the state and national average. Like many aging urban centers that are over-the-hill, the city has been in debt for a long time. The governors of Michigan have appointed emergency managers to run the city and others like it. While there is an elected city council, they do not manage the city’s government. I suppose they are more in the “advice and consent” role.
A couple of years ago, the city council voted to change the water source from Detroit Water to a new system coming from Lake Huron. In a snit, Detroit served notice to Flint that they were kicking them off the existing system, but the new source wouldn’t be ready until mid-2016. So, the emergency manager switched to the Flint River (which had long been identified as the backup system) for the interim and the problems immediately became apparent, at least to water users.
Initially, there was a lot of denial by state and federal EPA officials. Governor Rick Snyder’s office seemed to be slow on the uptake. A number of officials have lost their jobs over this crisis, but how much damage has been done in the process? As you might imagine, lawsuits abound and more are coming. The bill will be huge. Trail lawyers are licking their chops.
I mentioned finger-pointing, so you might imagine that the blame game is underway which means that politics are involved. Flint is heavily Democrat, unionized and has been for a long time. The governor is a Republican. The environmental agencies are staffed largely by Democrats. At times, it seems like officials are more concerned about who gets blamed than actually helping the people who are suffering.
I think this mishap sequence is a tragedy of errors and bad timing. Flint has been suffering for an extended period of time as automotive plant closings have created high unemployment. Tax revenues have been insufficient to cover costs, which of course never go down. In an attempt to curb future costs, the water source was switched, but the new source wasn’t yet ready, so a stop-gap measure was selected to fill the gap. That interim source, the Flint River, contained untreated contaminants which caused damage to aging infrastructure. Many people have suffered while the government agencies denied there was a problem. At some point in the future, we’ll see this scenario in a movie.
While the situation in Flint is still being investigated and more revelations are sure to come, it seems to me there are several lessons that all too often, repeat themselves. First, government agencies are often slow to react to problems and frequently focus their attention on minor issues at the expense of others far more serious. Second, short-term, interim solutions often create more problems than they are intended to solve, which often leads to unintended consequences. Lastly, government agencies rarely conduct strategic planning and create reserves to handle emergencies. When they scramble at the last moment to solve a problem long in coming, their haste creates more problems.
Here in the Suwannee River Valley, we take clean, abundant water for granted. My well draws from the aquifer that feeds Blue Springs, which produces 1.4 million gallons of incredibly pure, naturally filtered water every hour. In our water management district, we have more fresh water resources than the rest of the state combined and the least population pressure on that resource. There are a lot of reasons we take the resource for granted; maybe we shouldn’t.