Flint ​Water Situation ​Slowly ​Improving

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Flint ​Water Situation ​Slowly ​Improving

The situation in Flint is still difficult. Today, residents still use lead filters and bottled water for safety, and still paying bills for water that they can’t use, and for health problems that were the result of the crisis.

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 Flint River in Flint Michigan, Source: Wikimedia Commons, Author U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

But the $87 million settlement reached between residents and the city of Flint mandating pipe replacement has already begun to bring new water infrastructure into some parts of the city. All of Flint’s 18,000 damaged pipes are set to be replaced by 2020, and replacement has already started. 

“2020 sounds like a long time, but there’s only two other cities in America that have entirely replaced their lead pipes: Lansing, Michigan and Madison, Wisconsin. “They both did it over a decade,” Hanna-Attisha says. “So mandating it over three years is actually unprecedented.”    

Hanna-Attisha now directs the Pediatric Public Health Initiative, a program and partnership between the University of Michigan and Hurley Children’s Hospital that will track children and adults directly affected by Flint’s water, and help them find treatment for any health issues that come from it.

Marc Edwards, who was awarded the first-ever MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award for his work in exposing dangerously high lead levels in Flint’s water continues his research and has set aside half of the prize money specifically for Flint. In his opinion, the water crisis has truly “shaken the confidence” Flint residents have in the EPA and in water utilities. But it also reveals an issue that other cities share: “It exemplifies the problem between infrastructure and equality,” Edwards continues. “These post-industrial cities and rural America can’t afford the water system. They can’t afford to maintain it much less improve it.”

He proposes the idea that the federal government provide money for safe drinking water for those that cannot afford it, in the same matter that they provide money to ensure a basic level of education for children.

Read full article: Sierra

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