02.Water

And that’s not all. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease has killed at least 9 people and infected 87 others over the last two years. The state knew. The city knew. The county knew. The federal government knew. But the public was never told.

The city’s pipe inspector at the water plant won’t return calls.
The county health director won’t come to his door.
The mayor is busy in a meeting with Jada Pinkett Smith.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder gives interviews assuring citizens that the water is now safe for washing and tells me he would bathe his own grandchildren in it. The governor has no grandchildren.

That irony is not lost on Sabrina Hernandez who is helping raise her granddaughter, Hazel.Two months ago, state health inspectors came to the downtown bar where Hernandez works and instructed staff not to serve ice cubes or rinse lettuce with city water. Hazel, on the other hand?

“It’s like living in a Third World country,” Hernandez says. “What are they going to do to us next? It makes you think, was this because we are poor?”

Snyder knew the water was bad. Everybody knew the water was bad. E. coli and boil notices and mysterious rashes were immediately the stuff of headlines.

The water from the Flint River was so corrosive that General Motors workers noticed it rusted their parts.

In fairness, Flint has a long history of being financially incomprehensible. In 2002, hollowed out by three decades of industrial decline, Flint had a $30 million operating deficit. The mayor was recalled and an emergency financial manager was installed.

The new mayor, accused of bribery and lying about the city’s finances, resigned for “health reasons.” Enter Snyder and his band of bean counters.

All the while, Detroit’s water utility was fleecing Flint, charging one of the poorest cities in the United States an average of $910 a year per household, nearly three times the national average.

So in 2013, Flint’s civic leaders pushed for the construction of their own $300 million water system running parallel to Detroit’s. It wasn’t necessary; Detroit’s water was perfectly fine, if overpriced. But think of the jobs. Think of the money. The chamber of commerce wanted it. The trade unions wanted it. The contractors wanted it.

And so, the Republican governor’s people signed off on the new multimillion-dollar water system even though Vehicle City was broke. Just one problem— the necessary upgrades weren’t made to the old plant before people were served water from a river known as a dumping ground for corpses and car batteries.

Flint’s water crisis has become a symbol that resonates across America — but a symbol of what?Of working-class decline? Disregard for a majority-black population? Bloated government? The push to cut and privatize public services? Even as Flint became front-page news and federal water safety protocols were exposed to be laughable, the Obama administration proposed slashing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency’s testing budget to help meet spending cuts imposed by Congress. Experts warn there are many other cities—Cleveland, for one—with water that is as bad or worse.

Is Flint an outlier or a harbinger of a Mad Max future of crumbling roads, joblessness, and poisoned water? One thing is for sure: The rage felt by the residents of Flint is little different from the rage felt in other quarters of America—the feeling that you’re losing ground, that the deck is stacked against you and the people on top don’t give a damn.

“I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything,” Hernandez says. “But it makes me wonder if it’s not intentional. This community, we don’t have a voice. Nobody listens to the poor people that are, you know, barely making it.”