Annette Williams is careful to hold her granddaughter Sharell’s head at bath time, to keep the two-year-old from taking a gulp of toxic water, she said.
Although most people no longer drink what flows through Flint’s corroded pipes, many families have little choice but to bathe in it.
Sharell has been sick for months — ear infections, skin rashes and coughs, Williams said, adding that she cooks all her meals using bottled water, and has taught the eldest of her three grandchildren, Promise, six, to wash her sister’s face with a flannel.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, total isolation is near impossible.
Sharell has developed a habit of sucking on her wet towel when no one is looking, Williams said.
Williams, 48, is terrified of what might happen because the family bathes in the water, she said.
Inadequately treated water has coursed into Flint homes since at least April 2014, bringing toxins and poisonous lead that leached off the city’s aging pipes. There are no safe levels of lead exposure: Even low levels can cause lifelong developmental damage to young children.
“I know it’s wrong to do it. We shouldn’t be bathing in it, but what else can we do?” Williams said.
On Monday, all three children went to the hospital for blood tests for toxins. All of Flint’s 8,657 children under six should be considered exposed, according to a recent citywide public health directive.
Since the city’s emergency managers decided to draw Flint’s water from the highly corrosive local river, this small city of 100,000 people — about 110km from Michigan’s great lakes, the world’s largest freshwater source — has suffered alone, let down by local, state and federal officials and almost entirely ignored by the rest of the US.
Williams can see the river from her living room, in the city’s impoverished northeast.
She used to fish for dinner on its banks, but now she cannot bear to look at it, she said.
“It’s all just poison now,” she said.
Life has changed immeasurably in the last two years. Residents live in a state of indignity, fear and paranoia. Some residents refuse to shower, others eat only from paper plates, and many suffer rashes and hair loss. Adding insult to injury, the city’s water bills are among the highest in the US.
In common with 41 percent of Flint residents, Williams has endured this crisis in poverty and as are 56 percent of they city’s residents, she is black.
She has no income and hitches rides three days per week to spend precious food stamps on the 70 liters of bottled water that her family needs, she said.
Although things have got a little easier since US National Guard troops rolled into town two weeks ago, supply drops have yet to reach her home, she said.
Williams scratched her arms.
She “ashes” everyday after showering and wonders whom to blame, she said.
“I feel the governor let us down,” she said. “We never really knew what was going on.”
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, has fought off calls for his resignation and criticism about his delayed response to the crisis.
Snyder’s administration placed the city under emergency management in 2011, a decision that wrested control from the city council and imposed cost-cutting — which in turn led the city to the filthy river for water.
For 18 months the administration ignored signs that water was contaminated, before finally rerouting supplies in October last year.
Melissa Mays first noticed something was wrong when two months after the switch yellow water that stank spurted through her taps, she said.
It made her hair fall out, but along, with her husband and their three sons she drank from the taps when the city assured them nothing was wrong, she said.
In the winter of 2014, her son Christian, then 11, fell from his bike and shattered his wrists, which had become brittle, she said.
Mays felt her bones ache too — a sure sign of lead poisoning, she said.
She noticed the city had quietly advised residents to boil the water before consuming it, and that a General Motors plant had redirected its water after engine parts started rusting, she said.
All her family later tested positive for heavy metal poisoning, she said, adding that she feels some of the guilt herself.
“It comes when Christian wakes up every night and he’s crying, and there’s nothing I can do. I know that somebody else did this, but it was my job to protect him, I didn’t. We’re just seeing the early signs of it. It takes up to five years to see the full effects of lead poisoning,” she said.
Her days are dictated by the amount of bottled water she keeps in the house, she said, adding that she washes all the family’s food with it and boils her kettle with it.
She instructs her boys to shower sitting down, by pouring warm cups of water quickly over their bodies, she said, adding that the sight of steam from the bathroom makes her jump, as she worries it could carry the poison into her body through her pores.
Mays on Tuesday last week was at the Michigan State Capitol, when a humbled Snyder apologized to residents.
He blamed state environment officials, later suspending two employees.
Mays was far from convinced.
“If he was sorry, he’d have come and talked to the citizens, and we’d have shovels in the ground digging those pipes up,” she said.
A cache of files obtained by the Guardian through a public records request shows several red flags that should have tipped off officials about the water catastrophe.
In February last year, just weeks after the University of Michigan-Flint reported elevated lead levels on campus, Flint resident Lee-Anne Walters brought the high-lead levels in her household’s water to officials’ attention.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) later that month discussed Walters’ lead results in an e-mail.
With the subject line “HIGH LEAD: FLINT Water testing Results”, the EPA’s Jennifer Crooks wrote to local officials that she had been discussing Walters’ “water situation” for several weeks.
Crooks was stunned by the results: 104 parts per billion of lead. The EPA’s regulatory limit is 15 parts per billion.
“WOW!!! Did he find the LEAD!” Crooks wrote, adding: “She has 2 children under the age of 3? Big worries here.”
However, state environmental officials felt it was an isolated case. They assuaged the fears of EPA expert Miguel Del Toral, by saying the city used corrosion controls to prevent the river from leaching contaminants from water pipes.
Del Toral later confirmed that was not the case in an April 25 last year e-mail, writing that the “whole town may have much higher lead levels” than state officials believed.
The lack of corrosion control in Flint, was a “major concern from a public health standpoint,” he later wrote.
It would not be until October, with lead contamination levels averaging 11 parts per billion, that government officials conceded the situation in Flint was a “public safety issue.”
At a makeshift bottled water collection point, run by a county politician in the city’s north side, a line of cars stretched around the block on Friday last week. Volunteers stuffed cars full of crates. At the eight distribution points manned by the Michigan National Guard, residents were required to bring identification and could, as of Saturday last week, collect only one crate per day.
The Guardian witnessed several people turned away by troops.
Eric Davis, an unemployed laborer on the city’s north side, stopped drinking the tap water only two months ago, he said, adding that he continues to shower in it and has rashes on his eyelids.
The 53-year-old sat in his living room clutching a Red Cross-delivered crate of water, and pointed to the dry skin and bloody scratches on his knees and arms.
“My skin ain’t never been like this,” he said. “My body feels contaminated. It feels like they trying to kill us out here.”
His roommate, Jeffrey Moore, 58, has refused to shower for two weeks, he said, adding that he boils water and wipes it over his body instead.
“We’re alone out here,” Moore said.
Until a few weeks ago, with a Michigan primary looming in March, Flint’s water crisis was barely acknowledged on the US presidential campaign trail or in the national media.
Earlier this month, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton called the delayed response by Michigan officials “unconscionable,” and her rival, US Senator Bernie Sanders, has repeatedly called for Snyder to resign.
On Jan. 24, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush praised Synder “for stepping up right now.”
On Thursday last week, US President Barack Obama announced US$80 million in aid for the people of Flint.
“Our children should not have to be worried about the water that they’re drinking in American cities,” he said. “That’s not something that we should accept.”
However, Flint residents fear the money will never reach them, and are angered that Obama chose not to visit the city during a trip to Detroit last week.
At the Masonic temple in downtown Flint on Saturday last week, hundreds of residents arrived to test their bodies for lead. The testing kits, paid for not by the government but by a local lawyer, ran out within an hour.
Ardis Porter, 26, and five-year-old son Grant arrived early enough to see a nurse. They only stopped using tap water to brush their teeth two weeks ago, Porter said, adding that Grant, whose hair started falling out in November last year, cried as the needle pierced his skin.
She worries her unborn child may also have been exposed, she said.
“They should be testing everybody because they’ve exposed us all to this,” Porter said. “It wouldn’t be handled like this in other areas. People don’t care about the poor.”
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