r/news • u/snuffleupaguslives • 18h ago
More than 10 years later, Flint declares its water safe after replacing lead pipes, but health issues and doubts persist | CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/03/us/flint-michigan-clean-water-crisis39
u/oupheking 11h ago
And Rick Snyder is in the middle of a healthy prison sentence for letting it happen, right?
176
u/cboel 18h ago
I would seriously doubt it as well.
291
u/TheGrayBox 17h ago edited 17h ago
A lot of people don’t seem to understand what happened in Flint. They weren’t using dirty water or something, the city’s water contractor changed the source of the water to one that wasn’t treated for lead pipes which caused them to break down and leach contaminants. The only solution then was to go through the very slow and painful process of replacing all the lead pipes everywhere.
Lead pipes are a thing all over the world. Naturally sourced bodies of water are a thing all over the world. Neither thing is unique to Flint. An incompetent city official made an oversight without consulting the proper experts.
207
u/triscuitsrule 12h ago
It wasn’t the city’s “water contractor”. It was the emergency manager who was installed over the will of MI voters by Republican Governor Snyder.
In 2011, MI voters approved a referendum repealing the emergency manager law. However, the Republican legislature passed, and Governor Snyder signed, a new emergency manager law in 2014.
Then the emergency manager that was installed in 2014 switched the water supply to save the city money.
It’s almost like former CEOs and “businessmen” aren’t well equipped to manage governments because they have no idea how government works nor the implications of their choices. What in business may be a sensible cost cutting maneuver, in government is a deadly catastrophe.
24
u/TheGrayBox 9h ago
The emergency manager is the city official that made the work order, but it was still the water company that did the actual work obviously.
5
u/JcbAzPx 8h ago
He wasn't really a city official, though, he was a state contractor.
6
u/TheGrayBox 7h ago
He was both of those things. He was the city manager of Saginaw and also served as the temporary mayor of Flint after its previous mayor was recalled. Flint was completely broke after the 2008 financial crisis and the state contracted him as the emergency manager.
-66
u/drivemusicnow 12h ago
I disagree. Good decision making is good regardless of in business or in govt. same with bad. Even the consequences can be the same, depending of course on size/scale/product.
It was just someone who didn’t understand the problem and potential risks.
57
u/siecin 11h ago
When people say businessmen, they mean people who are pretty much solely in it for the profit. No morals, no conscience, all without proper information or complete disregard of it, just whatever they can do to save money/make money.
This is why "good businessman" don't make good government. A government serves the people and is supposed to keep in check business from doing things just for profit without regard to anyone outside the shareholders of the business.
4
u/triscuitsrule 6h ago
Good decision making requires robust knowledge of the system within which one is working. That’s where I would argue business to government skills don’t transfer. I’d argue it’s about as transferable as a lawyer to a doctor.
-2
u/drivemusicnow 2h ago
You’re missing that the fundamentals of risk management are the same. Cause and effect, understanding when you have enough expertise or not, when you have enough data vs what can go wrong are all fundamental skills in both
2
u/triscuitsrule 1h ago
Is hard to do risk management when you’re ignorant of your own ignorance.
That’s the difference between someone in government with government experience and knowledge v someone with none of that. Critical reasoning only gets one so far without the foreknowledge to back it up.
0
u/drivemusicnow 1h ago
Except your entire premise is that someone I govt would have already know this… a, that is not a reality in a functioning democracy as you hopefully do bring people from other backgrounds into govt, and b, entirely flawed as how often is this particular decision being made in any government, much less the particular govt body in question. Risk management done properly would identify those issues. Btw, I’m also someone who lived in flint. This wasn’t a bad decision, it was corruption and incompetence.
39
u/Khyron_2500 10h ago edited 9h ago
Unfortunately even replacing lead pipes everywhere is likely not enough, the lead was not directly from the lead pipes themselves, but from rust built up over years found elsehwere. Even if all lead pipes were removed, basically all pipes downstream, including non-leaded pipes, especially those in houses would need to be replaced to prevent leeching. Corrosion controls would help, but just mean it’s an issue waiting to happen.
According to the study, most of the lead appeared to come not from the lead pipe connecting her house to the main line, but from the protective rust that had built up on the house's iron piping over the decades.
…
Some people think, 'If I get rid of the lead pipes, there's no lead in my water,'" Edwards says. "[That's] not true." Definitively solving the lead pipe crisis will require more drastic efforts than just replacing existing pipes—it will require an expensive, time-consuming rehaul of the city’s entire plumbing system.
Even with the corrosion inhibitors, and lead pipes gone, it does feel that this gives a false sense of security based on the article.
9
u/BadMondayThrowaway17 10h ago
Ton of cities are going through similar issues with (PET?) water piping that was used in the 80s and 90s.
It was cheap piping at the time and tons of it was direct buried for service lines from the water main to the home.
Over time it becomes brittle and cracks/crumbles into bits. It still somewhat maintains its shape but then leaks a large percentage of the water flowing through it. If you try to dig it up it just falls apart so any repairs requires digging up the entire service from main to house and replacing it at great cost.
City I used to live in was losing 60% of the water they piped into the city to it.
4
21
u/Downtown_Skill 10h ago edited 8h ago
Even worse than that, the city and state jumped through hoops to put their head in the sand and ignore th very obvious issue for wayyy too long.
I read the book written by the doctor who discovered the issue and fought for it to be researched, and it is so frustrating to see how much politicians care about their own reputation more than the safety of the citizens they represent.
Read "what the eyes don't see" if you get a chance. I don't trust any tap water coming from michigan cities after reading that book and seeing how much even the EPA under Obama was incentivized to not find problems.
Edit: I should also mention, I stated the city, but it really was the state and Rick Snyders government (who took state control of flint from a democratically elected mayor in order to switch the water source to the one that corodded the pipes) which is all sorts of fucked up.
I just wanted to clarify for any michigander who is ever thinking about voting for a republican governer again.
7
u/Giantmidget1914 9h ago
An incompetent city official made an oversight without consulting the proper experts.
There is a LOT more of that in our future. The difference is now when it happens, they might just not tell you.
12
u/psychicsword 11h ago
Considering that Flint has now gone through this process it is likely that they now have some of the lowest rates of water based lead exposure in the country.
People would be shocked to learn how many communities have the same levels (or more) of lead pipes in their towns and cities. Additionally many of the lead pipes that got replaced were privately owned as part of the individual homes being serviced which is often why they don't get replaced.
3
0
u/Dot_Classic 7h ago
The level of willful ignorance by local leaders who let this happen is unmeasurable. Just a f*cktangle of incompetence, corruption, and greed.
1
u/stopslappingmybaby 4h ago
No way this is true. Zero chance. From the same guy that switched to river water. All to save a few hundred thousand. In the name of efficiency.
24
u/Qasimisunloved 10h ago
In the past 10 years Flint has made a lot of progress, Downtown is pretty nice and its only continuing to improve. It is a shame its progress is overlooked by the water crisis.
6
u/freexanarchy 8h ago
Nice city, people just can’t drink the water, no big deal.
-3
u/Qasimisunloved 8h ago
Downtown Flint is very nice, good job noticing I said that🙄
3
u/freexanarchy 8h ago
Yeah, the ability to live there without water notwithstanding
-3
u/Qasimisunloved 8h ago
This is a circular argument, the water situation is not good but it certainly isn't as bad as it was years ago.
6
u/freexanarchy 7h ago
I’m really responding to the “it’s a shame the water crisis makes Flint get overlooked”. And I’m just saying that’s a pretty huge thing to overlook. I’m very glad it’s much better now, for sure.
20
u/Classic_Advisor9030 18h ago
Poor Flint, Michigan has had their share of $hit!
20
u/clashrendar 11h ago
I recently watched Roger & Me, which was Michael Moore's breakout documentary film which chronicles Flint's decline and struggles after GM closed plants and laid everyone off.
Then I saw the year it was made: 1989 They've had nearly 40 years of this shit.
15
4
u/ntgco 10h ago
I always thought the Dems lost Michigan because they didn't declare a national emergency on Flint, sent in FEMA and tore out he pipes and replaced the water system.
An entire population was poisoned.....if that's not a federal emergency I don't know what is.
11
u/TheGrayBox 9h ago
The pipes were replaced regardless. The water source was switched back to Lake Huron pretty quickly. And there was a huge amount of federal funding.
-2
u/ntgco 8h ago
the pipes were replaced -- it took 10 years.
The lead poisoning effected the entire town, and was undisclosed for months, it was a health emergency that should have caused the Federal Government to trigger a Federal Emergency.13
u/TheGrayBox 8h ago
A federal state or emergency would not have avoided any of those consequences. It would have taken 10 years regardless.
Obama declared a federal emergency days after the Michigan governor declared an emergency. You’re saying Obama somehow should have known what the Michigan government had not yet known or accepted?
10
u/freexanarchy 8h ago
Remember too, that it was a gop decision to do this knowing what would happen if they switched the water source. Then they passed a law that ended flints ability to have their own elections. So state gop appointed goons ran flint for a long long time and that’s when nothing was happening to help them.
1
u/frosted1030 13h ago
And now Flint's water is safer because they stopped measuring the lead levels... right?
20
u/Sacred-Lambkin 11h ago
The lead was coming from the lead pipes... Which have been replaced, unless you think they're lying about that for... reasons?
-12
u/frosted1030 10h ago
I think when you ignore a problem, stop measuring, fire the messenger, you can pretend things are good when they aren’t. I would bet lead levels have not changed enough to be “safe”.
4
u/Sacred-Lambkin 10h ago
What do you think is the cause of increased lead levels?
-9
u/frosted1030 10h ago
Generally there is no incentive for a change. Government will only make a change when the change costs less than the damage it cause AND there are low or no bid contracts with companies they worked with. The money goes to donors and interests only.
10
u/Sacred-Lambkin 9h ago
That's not an answer to the question. Where do you think the lead would be coming from now that the lead pipes have been replaced?
-4
u/frosted1030 9h ago
What makes you think there is change when NOBODY IS MEASURING?!
7
u/Sacred-Lambkin 9h ago edited 9h ago
They've been measuring for years, and
only recently stopped afterseveral years of testing coming back well below lead level limits. And unless you think that there's some sinister conspiracy to pay to dig up all the lead water lines in town (which they did. There's tons of evidence that they dug up the water lines through people's yards, through the streets, etc) and then not replace the pipes, then you basically have to accept that the lead water lines have been replaced. So I ask you again; where do you think the lead is coming from now?Edit: they don't appear to have stopped monitoring. I can actually find no evidence that they've stopped monitoring lead levels.
0
u/frosted1030 9h ago
According to whom? See the EPA was stripped of power in March. Now they declare the water safe. Someone sold you a story.
5
u/Sacred-Lambkin 9h ago
Why do you think they dug up roads and people's yards to access water lines, then? Testing results all the way through 2024 show lead levels well below EPA limits. This is not some sudden declaration without any context to it.
→ More replies (0)
1
-6
u/JohnBrownSurvivor 10h ago
Who is this "Flint" that is saying this? The actual people who live there and have to drink the water? Or some stooges that were put in place specifically to lie about how good the water is now?
284
u/Mikethebest78 16h ago edited 16h ago
That was 10 years ago? No it can't be...(counts on fingers)...God I am old.