1
The Well
And pines with thirst amidst a sea of waves.
—Homer, The Odyssey (eighth century B.C.E.)
I.
Men in jewel-toned ties grinned and held their clear plastic cups high, each filled with water poured from an insulated pot. The shine of their watches and wedding rings winked under the fluorescent lights. Outside the old treatment plant, the April air was gray and cool. The edges of the spider-legged water tower seemed to blur into the morning haze.
“Here’s to Flint!” said Mayor Dayne Walling. He was a city native, born to two schoolteachers, and energy hummed through him. He had a tendency to fidget, to gulp his coffee, and to speak with passion on a fast-moving series of topics. A Rhodes scholar with a master’s degree in urban studies, he returned to his hometown in 2006, the year he turned thirty-two. Three years later, he became its mayor.
And now, in the spring of 2014, Walling was leading the toast. The dozen or so others gathered that day in a small outbuilding off Dort Highway hoisted their cups higher and chorused in response. “Hear, hear!” They tilted their heads back, marking the moment when, for the first time in two generations, the people of Flint would drink from their namesake river.1
“It tastes like … water,” remarked city councilman Joshua Freeman.
That was surely a good sign.
Darnell Earley, the city’s emergency manager, was also at the treatment plant. He was the latest in a string of emergency managers, or EMs, that were first appointed by the State of Michigan in 2011 to lead Flint out of serious financial distress. It was a peculiar position. Earley held the full power of both the mayor’s office and the City Council to do what needed to be done to stabilize the community. The idea of emergency management is that an outside official who is not constrained by local politics or the prospect of a reelection bid will be able to better make the difficult decisions necessary to get a struggling city or school district back on solid ground. In Flint, that meant that the authority of Mayor Walling and the council had been suspended for more than two years. Their roles were now symbolic and advisory, or empowered (and paid) only to the extent that Earley allowed.2
In a city with plenty of urgent matters competing for attention—poverty, vacancy, schools, crime, jobs—one thing Flint didn’t have to worry about was the quality of its water. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department had supplied Flint with good water for nearly fifty years. The big public utility drew from the freshwater of Lake Huron, a lake so deep and fierce that it once swallowed eight ships in a single storm.3 The DWSD then treated and pumped Flint’s water at a plant near the shoreline and delivered it through a 120-inch pipeline to another pump station. From there, the flow was pushed through a smaller line until it reached the city’s kitchen sinks. Flint’s own treatment plant, which it had used to treat its river water before joining the DWSD in the 1960s, sat idle. It remained on hand only because the state required a backup water source for emergencies.
While the quality of DWSD water was reliable, its cost was not. Long before the emergency managers came to town, residents had urged their leaders to relieve the burden of pricey water. Monthly rates in Flint were among the most expensive in the country, and yet 42 percent of residents lived below the federal poverty level.4 And the rates kept rising—a 25 percent increase here, a 45 percent increase there. Many residents just couldn’t afford their bills. But at this point it was difficult for the city to do much about it. Its infrastructure was built to serve Flint when it had twice the people it had now; to maintain it, fewer ratepayers had to carry a heavier burden. Efforts to negotiate a better wholesale deal with the DWSD didn’t go far, either. The Detroit system charged more for delivering water to higher elevations and across longer distances. While it served communities across eight Michigan counties, Flint was easily the farthest out, at the end of the DWSD’s northernmost line. There was just no wriggle room. It seemed to Mayor Walling that the DWSD was taking Flint, its second-largest customer, for granted.5
Jeff Wright agreed. He was Genesee County’s drain commissioner, holding an elected office that made him responsible for water management issues.6 Wright was fond of portraying the DWSD, a public utility, as a price-gouging monopoly, and he saw an opportunity to develop an alternative. He called it the Karegnondi Water Authority, using a common moniker for Lake Huron on seventeenth-century maps.7 This new water authority was just an idea at first, and seen as a negotiating tactic to pressure the DWSD for better rates. But then the not-yet-existent KWA got a permit from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to pull 85 million gallons of water per day out of the Great Lakes. The MDEQ reasoned that the big diversion wouldn’t be a problem for the ecosystem because it would all balance out: the Detroit system would use less water as its customers moved over to the KWA. Then the new public system incorporated, and it became a real force. Flint and its neighboring communities were invited to help build it from the ground up. At the first meeting of the KWA board, Walling was elected chair.
Unlike the Detroit system, which delivered treated water, the KWA would pump raw water to the communities it served. That meant they would have to treat the water first before selling it on to residents and businesses. For Flint, it would mean rebooting the old treatment plant off Dort Highway and navigating the complexities of water chemistry in-house.
Darnell Earley championed the switch to the KWA as a way for Flint to build self-sufficiency. “The city has had virtually no control over managing its most important resource and service, and that is the water,” he argued.8 What’s more, he said, it would save the city a lot of money. The region would gain $200 million a year over twenty-five years, and far more after that, according to the numbers from Ed Kurtz, Earley’s predecessor as EM. They implied that Flint would be one of the beneficiaries of that.9 It wasn’t lost on them that the fury over high water rates—and the shutoffs and the arrests of people with illegal water hookups—was escalating. The KWA would create a more cost-efficient water system over the long term, they said, and it would spare residents unpredictable fee hikes.
With Flint under emergency management, the EM was the sole person with the authority to make decisions for the city. So the council was surprised when it was convened for a rare vote in 2013, to decide whether it should join the KWA. At the time, a pending lawsuit threatened to overturn Michigan’s emergency manager law, so the champions of the KWA wanted to get Flint’s elected leaders on the record as supporting the switch. As an engineering consultant described the strategy in an email, the emergency manager “has given powers back to Mayor and Council to make the decision on KWA as a precaution if the EM court challenge holds up. This will enable the Mayor and Council to approve the KWA agreement and not be challenged in court!”10
After a heated hearing, the council voted 7–1 in favor. The one “no” vote was cast by Bryant Nolden, or BB, a middle school teacher who represented the Third Ward in north Flint. “It wasn’t that I was really against the KWA,” he said later. “It was just the process in which it was done, and having people wanting you to vote on something without having all of the information. And I just wasn’t going to be a party to that.”11
While the council vote had no power behind it, the event was played up to suggest that the city had determined its own future. “I have said from the beginning that this decision must be made by Flint’s City Council and Mayor,” said Jeff Wright in a press release. He indicated that while the emergency manager supported the switch, the council vote was a condition for Flint to join. “There is a basic tenet that government is best when it has local control.”12
Michigan’s state treasurer approved the change (even though it meant that Detroit’s water department would lose a major source of revenue just as that city, which was also under emergency management, was about to declare bankruptcy).13 Flint’s EM then contracted with the KWA to purchase 18 million gallons of water for the city per day, 2 million more than the council had approved in its vote.
But construction on the KWA hadn’t even begun yet. The new system wouldn’t be able to deliver water for at least a couple more years. Until it was ready, the other Genesee County communities that were moving to the new system simply paid the DWSD for continuous water service. Flint, however, made the unusual decision to enlist a different source of water during this transition period. The city turned to its emergency supply: the Flint River.
To treat the river water, the old Dort Highway plant needed a series of upgrades. Many of these improvements would be required anyway, since the plant would soon have to treat raw water from the KWA.14 But getting the facility up to speed was difficult, and while cost estimates varied widely, only a fraction of the early figures proposed by the engineering consultants was spent on the project.15
The month of the water switch, Michael Glasgow, Flint’s utilities administrator, didn’t believe the plant was ready.16 He emailed three people at the MDEQ, the state environmental agency, with a warning. “I have people above me making plans” to distribute the water as soon as possible, Glasgow wrote, but “I do not anticipate giving the OK to begin sending water out anytime soon. If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple of weeks, it will be against my direction. I need time to adequately train additional staff and to update our monitoring plans before I will feel we are ready. I will reiterate this to management above me, but they seem to have their own agenda.”17
Still, other decision makers gave the treatment plant their vote of confidence.18 And so, on a dull spring morning, Mayor Walling’s toast was the start of a cheerful ceremony. Metal chairs for the guests and media were lined in rows on the yellow tiled floor, facing a podium that stood between the national and state flags. After remarks from several officials, Walling approached a circular gray box that was mounted on the cinder block wall. It controlled the rush of water through Flint.
“This is our moment, so I think we need a countdown,” Walling said, looking back at the crowd. He wore a navy blazer, a light blue tie, and an American flag pin on his lapel. His left index finger was poised atop a small black button. “From three?”
The men smiled back at him. “Three! Two! One!” they chanted. Then, a hush. Walling pushed the button, and the system powered down. He pulled his hand away but kept his eye on the controls until the green light darkened and the red light sparked to life, showing that the freshwater supply from Detroit had been closed off. That’s when the applause started. “Yeah!” someone hollered madly. After the residual water flowed out of the system, the City of Flint would be relying solely on the river water.
“Water is an absolute vital service that most everyone takes for granted,” Walling said the day of the switch. “It’s a historic moment for the city of Flint to return to its roots and use our own river as our drinking water supply.”19 That rousing sentiment was echoed in the local paper. An editorial heralded the switch as a way for the city to reclaim its sovereignty, which had been undermined by disinvestment and emergency management. “Switch to Flint River Water Represents a New Era in Flint,” ran the Flint Journal headline.20 “Let’s raise our drinking water glasses and cheers to a new direction for the next 40 years,” the editorialists wrote.
Stephen Busch, a light-haired district supervisor from the MDEQ’s drinking water office, was at the ceremony too. A year earlier, when the city was wrestling with its long-term water options, he had expressed worry about what would happen if Flint treated its own river for drinking water—bacterial problems, exposure to dangerous chemicals, additional regulatory requirements.21
In other words, the state’s environmental agency had thought that the city should avoid the Flint River. And now Flint was using the river anyway. For all his earlier concern, though, Busch seemed tranquil at the treatment plant that April morning.22 Regarding the drinking water, he said, “Individuals shouldn’t notice any difference.”
II.
In the beginning, the water was a blessing. Native people were nourished for centuries by the river, which flowed for 142 curving miles. It merged into a broader river network that pours northward into Saginaw Bay, the body of water that separates the Michigan mitten from its thumb. The Ojibwa called it biwânag sibi, which translates as “Flinty River.”23 It ran gently downslope. Trees grew along the banks, casting shadows in a flickering lace over the glassy surface. People crossed the river at a shallow point shrouded by alder and black ash trees, near a meadow where some Ojibwa grew corn. It was part of a trail that ran between the young cities of Saginaw and Detroit.24 French traders baptized this point as the grande traverse, or the “main crossing.” Or Grand Traverse, as it is today rendered in the name of a street and a neighborhood in Flint.25
In the early 1800s, this swath of riverside land caught the eye of Jacob Smith, a butcher from Quebec who remade himself into an enterprising fur trader in the territorial woods. Smith was an agile man with a slight frame who would later be depicted by an artist in the costume of an archetypal frontiersman: buckskin, boots, a wide-brimmed hat. He moved to a country that had only just won its independence, settling in Detroit, but he often spent time trading in the Saginaw Valley woods. He spoke a local dialect fluently, and he extended thousands of dollars of credit in trade to the Ojibwa. They called him Wah-be-seens, or “young swan.”
Fortunes were made in the forests of Michigan Territory. For nearly two hundred years, traders bought and sold beneath the heavy branches. Competition was fierce. In the uneasy peace after the Revolutionary War, the British did not forget the wealth in these woods. Just across the border, in Canada, they held out hope that they might regain the Michigan peninsulas for themselves. When war broke out again in 1812, British troops marched into Detroit, which they reclaimed without firing a shot.26 The hostilities brought the fur trade to a halt, but meanwhile Smith collected wartime experiences that are the stuff of novels: he was a soldier, spy, prisoner, escape artist, and military captain. Eventually, in 1819, he used sneaky tactics with both Ojibwa leaders and the territorial governor Lewis Cass to get a controversial treaty signed that created Indian reservations and opened up about 4.3 million acres of Michigan Territory for white settlement.27 It also allotted eleven square miles of land around the grande traverse, where Smith wanted to set up a trading post, to his children. Much of that land would become modern-day Flint.
About ninety feet from the river, Smith built a small log cabin and opened for business. All went according to plan: Ojibwa trappers brought him pelts of beaver, muskrat, mink, otter, and raccoon, and Smith in turn sold the pelts to merchants from Detroit and Saginaw.28 He hired several employees to keep up with the brisk work. As native people were pushed farther out, and eastern settlers felt that the territory might be safe enough to buy land, traders such as Smith developed a habit of exaggerating stories about “ferocious animals”—mosquitoes, especially—and “treacherous Indians” as a way to keep out people whose presence would hurt their supply chain.29
But within six years of the treaty Smith was dead. Thus, the man who is conventionally credited as the founder of Flint never lived to see it as a real city. And thanks to years of reports about the land by the river being swampy, sandy, and damn near uninhabitable—not to mention land titling problems, cholera outbreaks, and the fearsome reputation of the Saginaw Ojibwa—there were few other white settlers in the area. The community did not even have its modern name yet. Smith’s grave marker declares him only to be “the first white settler at the Grand Traverse of Flint River Michigan where he died.”30
The followers came slowly, but they did come (and no doubt most Ojibwa would have preferred they not come at all). More than a decade after Smith’s death, someone set up a sawmill on the river. Families from upstate New York and New England began to move in, one of them taking over Smith’s empty cabin.31 Others built themselves frame and clapboard houses, and even some brick ones. There were so many people in the community from New York State’s Genesee Valley that when the settlers finally traced their political boundaries, they named their county Genesee. Flint, sitting directly in the center, was its seat.
About sixteen years after Smith founded the settlement, Alexis de Tocqueville passed through. He ate meals, found overnight hospitality, smacked the bugs that alighted on his skin, and wrote about it all in Two Weeks in the Wilderness, something of an addendum to his epic Democracy in America. The Flint River, Tocqueville wrote, was “strung out like a crimson thread at the end of the valley.”32
In later years, the river would not be described in such lovely language. The waterway would bear so much mistreatment from industry and development—chemical dumping, sewage effluent—that locals learned to avoid it.33 After a series of floods in the early twentieth century, massive concrete barricades were built to channel the downtown section of the river. They were meant to make the riverfront safer, but they became a fortress line that barred people from the water. Several small dams restricted the river’s navigability. Generations of kids were taught to fish in the Flint River, casting lines off the grassy banks in their neighborhoods, but invariably they learned to toss the catfish and carp back into the current. It was too dangerous to eat anything from the water.
This was an extraordinary fate for a river town that is only about seventy miles away from both Saginaw Bay and the shore of Lake Huron, part of the most remarkable chain of freshwater in the world. But so it was.
III.
Call them inland seas. Carved out at the end of the last glacial period, more than ten thousand years ago, and filled first with the meltwater of retreating sheets of ice, the Great Lakes hold about one fifth of the world’s surface freshwater.34 Spill it across the United States, and it will settle over the forty-eight conterminous states at an even depth of ten feet. At ninety-four thousand square miles, their surface area is about equal to that of the United Kingdom, and their drainage basin covers two hundred thousand square miles, almost the size of France.35 On a map, that basin stretches across ten degrees of latitude and eighteen degrees of longitude. The water is in constant motion, powered by rolling waves and rip currents, an engine strong enough to modulate the climate. If you stand on the moon, you can pick out their telltale shock of deep blue.
Michigan lies like a handprint in the water. An assertion of the human self in the wild sea: I am here. Its two curving peninsulas are shaped by where the waves of four of the five interconnected lakes crash. Michigan’s thirty-two hundred miles of coastline, more than for any other state except Alaska, turn from soft-blowing sand dunes into craggy beaches into the brilliantly colored cliffs and turrets of the Pictured Rocks, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set his famous poem about Hiawatha: By the shores of Gitche Gumee / By the shining Big-Sea-Water. Tens of thousands of tree-riddled islands are scattered over the Great Lakes. One of them is Isle Royale, the only national park that is an island, and reachable only by seaplane or a three-and-a-half-hour ferry ride. Moose roam among fat balsam firs, skinny aspens, mountain ash, and red maple trees. At dusk, loons sing their mournful call.
The seas were first crisscrossed by Mackinaw boats and bark canoes; then square-sailed brigs and three-masted schooners; and then lake freighters and passenger steamers that left a black flag of smoke unfurling behind them. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a letter from a steamboat off the southern shore of Lake Erie. “This lake without sails,” he wrote, “this shore which does not yet show any trace of the passage of man, this eternal forest which borders it; all that, I assure you, is not grand in poetry only; it’s the most extraordinary spectacle that I have seen in my life.”36
Standing as totems to how the water can be cruel, more than 120 lighthouses ring the coasts, shimmering like stars in the night.37 But they are not always enough. Lake Superior especially, the largest freshwater lake in the world, holds the wreckage of hundreds of ships, and those who sailed them, in its thousand-foot depths. Tales of ghost ships have been whispered, sailor to sailor, since at least 1679.38 The Ojibwa people—they lived not only on the shores of the Flint River but also far across the North Country—told stories about a spiny underwater monster called the mishipeshu. It conjured storms over the lakes, putting those who traveled on them in mortal danger. With its thrashing tail, it spun calm water into rapids and whirlpools; it broke the winter ice beneath your feet as if the cold, slick glass were as soft as butter. The monster might be appeased with a pinch of tobacco if you offered it at the start of your journey. It might be. Three or four hundred years ago, an artist traced the lynx-like shape of the mishipeshu in red ocher on a white crystalline cliff on Lake Superior’s northern shore. You can still see its horned silhouette today in an Ontario provincial park, among thirty-some more ordinary shapes of life in this corner of the world: a heron, an eagle, a beaver, a man on a horse. Mishipeshu stands in profile with its head cocked, as if watching those who, in their innocence, push off the rock and into the waves.
Inland in Michigan, you are never more than six miles away from a natural source of water. More than eleven thousand lakes are scattered around the state, many with wooden docks jutting into them from white-sand or stony beaches, beloved by tourists who make summer pilgrimages from cities on the lower latitudes: Lansing, Kalamazoo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. Around the state, a web of slow, dark rivers and streams, thirty-six thousand miles of them, spider from one lake to another, and then out toward the inland seas.
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Flint was still something of a frontier town, but it was flush from the lust for lumber. Michigan white pines were sold as far as San Francisco and Shanghai, and Flint was an excellent hub for them.39 Trees were cut in the woods, floated in on the Flint River during the spring thaw, sliced into boards in the sawmills, and then shipped around the world. With its growing population, Flint finally got around to incorporating as a city in 1855.
As Flint matured, so did other cities around the country. The Industrial Revolution sparked tremendous urban growth, while westward expansion led to ambitious development in new landscapes. One of the biggest challenges: figuring out how to get water to people. Easy access to water was a necessity for health, sanitation, fire prevention, and economic growth—that much was obvious. But working out how to provide it turned into a big, unruly experiment in shaping cities as places that serve the public good. Each community tried out different techniques, tailoring the design to its unique geography and expertise. Some pulled from surface water, others from groundwater, and still others combined the two. Philadelphia, one of the earliest innovators, got serious about building a water system after an epidemic of yellow fever killed about 10 percent of its population. The city installed miles of iron pipes, and, after a disappointing experiment in moving water with steam power, it upgraded to waterwheels. New York City built an expensive aqueduct from a reservoir in Westchester County in 1842, becoming one of the first in the country to use water from outside its own borders. Today the city draws from three lakes and nineteen reservoirs to move more than 1 billion gallons of water each day, and its crystal-clear quality is among the best in the country.40 Boston cast around for decades, commissioning reports and holding referenda but failing to take any meaningful action toward building a central waterworks. Frustration intensified during the “underground wars” between neighbors, when one would dig a new well that drained the well of the person next door. In 1838, Bostonians petitioned the City Council: “Let the thing be done, and done as soon as by any exertion consistent with prudence and reasonable economy is practicable.” Eight years later, the city finally broke ground on an aqueduct that drew water from Long Pond, about seventeen miles west. Thanks to gravity, water easily flowed down to the city.
As for the Great Lakes region, Chicago first had a private waterworks that served only a small portion of the city, but it didn’t work well. Live fish kept showing up in customers’ buckets. The city absorbed the company in 1851 and expanded its draw of freshwater from Lake Michigan. But supply was limited. Unless there was a fire, no public water was available on Sundays. Industry dumped so much waste into the Chicago River—chemicals and carcasses—that it contaminated the water that was pulled from the lakeshore, near where the river emptied. It made people sick. But of all the ideas bandied about as to how to make the water safer, nobody seriously entertained the idea of stopping the pollution. Instead, the city outpaced the disgusting effluent by building a two-mile tunnel through the bed of Lake Michigan to reach clearer waters. It then went further by building a canal that reversed the Chicago River, so that rather than emptying into the lake, the water (and pollution) flowed west, ending up in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Both were outstanding feats of engineering, transformative for the health of the rising city, and, while the river reversal is controversial to this day, the water system became a symbol of Chicago’s indefatigable spirit.41 A few years after the tunnel opened, the Great Chicago Fire ripped through the city. One of the few buildings in its path that survived was the Gothic water tower.
In Detroit, about seventy miles from Flint, early residents dipped buckets in the river that is part of the Great Lakes chain.42 To stave off fire in the wooden outpost, locals were required by law to keep a cask of water on hand. The fort later developed a delivery system by horse-drawn carriage. But in 1805 stray ash from a pipe ignited a fire that swallowed Detroit’s tinderbox structures as if they were nothing more than air.43 Bucket brigades and the city’s single fire engine attacked it, but it was no use. About six hours after the fire started, the only structures still standing were a stone warehouse, a little fort high on a hill, and a maze of blackened chimneys that, separated from their homes, now looked like aged tombstones.
The trauma led to the creation of a more sophisticated water system, one that, many years later, would play a large role in the fate of Flint. After an experiment with public wells failed, a wharf and pump were built near the river “at which all persons who may reside within the city of Detroit, shall be at all times … entitled to take and draw water for their use and convenience,” according to the authorizing legislation.44 In exchange, residents paid an annual tax of one dollar. They later paid a flat rate of ten dollars a year (commercial customers paid more) for water that ran through the city’s first pipelines: tamarack trees, which were rafted down waterways to Detroit, hollowed out, laid end to end, and joined by sleeves made of lead.45 Contemporary work crews still sometimes stumble upon wooden lines like these when they dig in the ground, and they find them to be in perfect shape.
As in other cities, the young waterworks in Detroit experimented with different technologies for delivery and treatment, but the company lost money while “being continually assailed with complaints of the inadequateness of the supply and the impurity of the water,” according to one history. The early administrators were found to have violated their charter to provide the city with safe water. In exclamatory fashion, an investigative committee recommended that the City Council “appoint some person [to lead a new waterworks] that will spend his time EXCLUSIVELY for the INTERESTS of the city.”46 They did so. But the new leadership had many of the same problems. Supply was so inconsistent that in some parts of Detroit, residents could draw water only at night.
For all the challenges, expectations for the right to quality water were rising. A turning point had come in 1854, when a thick-browed English doctor named John Snow made a huge discovery. The world was convulsing through the deadliest year of another cholera pandemic—the third in less than four decades, killing millions of people. Great Britain alone lost twenty-three thousand people the year that Snow used pioneering public health techniques to show that cholera spread through contaminated water. He was even able to pinpoint the specific water pump on Broad Street that was the source of the outbreak in London. Snow pled with local authorities to disable the pump, and when they did the plague ended. Despite this, it took years before Snow’s work won widespread acceptance. It contradicted the prevailing theory that cholera spread through miasma, or “bad air.” But Snow was eventually proved correct, as was the emerging germ theory—the notion that many diseases are spread by microscopic germs, often waterborne ones.
What this meant was that disease was best averted when all citizens were served by fully equipped waterworks and sewers. Providing service to just the wealthy few, as Chicago first tried, didn’t work. Cities sped up their work to deliver quality water to residents, not only by building pipes and pumps, but also by disinfecting it with chlorine and filtering it with sand and gravel. The improvements in health and mortality rates, especially among populations who lived in dense urban centers, were profound.
Making the delivery of clean, treated water a basic civic service took another step forward when, in 1881, twenty-two men from six states gathered in St. Louis, a city that had lost at least 6 percent of its population in a cholera outbreak a few decades earlier, when it had no sewer system.47 The men formed the American Water Works Association with an aim to professionalize water service, exchanging information that would spare cities from having to repeat the costly mistakes that had hindered others.48 In a foreboding note for twenty-first-century Flint, one of the discussion topics at the first AWWA conference was about the poisonous effect of lead pipes on drinking water.
Participation in the AWWA was voluntary, however. For all the hustle and innovation that went into connecting people to collective water systems, there were no enforceable national standards for safety. Until well into the twentieth century, the federal government’s environmental programs focused on conservation—things such as the forest service, the national parks service, and the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. Pollution and public health weren’t really on Washington’s radar. Local and state governments were left to make their own rules.
After more than a hundred attempts over fifty years, Congress passed the first major law addressing water quality in 1948. The Water Pollution Control Act was spurred by growing concern over the 2.5 billion tons of raw sewage that was being dumped into America’s waterways every single day.49 The law’s intentions were good—to reduce pollution in interstate waters—but as policy it was weak, too stripped down in its final form to improve the condition of water that, like the carcass-strewn Chicago River, bore the indignities of industry, agriculture, and human sewage.
The biggest advance didn’t come until the early 1970s, when the environmental movement triumphed with a number of new laws. Foremost among them were the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Three years after an errant spark set the chemical-slick Cuyahoga River in Ohio on fire—not for the first time, but never before featured so vividly in Time magazine—the Clean Water Act dramatically expanded earlier legislation to limit the toxic waste that was unloaded into America’s rivers, streams, and lakes.50 Passed by Congress over President Richard Nixon’s veto, it set the norm so that no industry had an automatic right to pollute the water. At about the same time, the Clean Air Act was greatly strengthened, which made for not only clearer skies but also clearer waters, since airborne pollution eventually settles on the waterways. The new Clean Air Act also affirmed the principle that the environment should be treated as a public trust, and, accordingly, it empowered people to file citizen suits to protect it.51
Then there was the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. It was designed so that there would be a national baseline for tap water. The old way of allowing states to set their own standards broke down after a number of highly publicized emergencies: cancer-causing chemicals found in the water supplies of New Orleans and Pittsburgh; bacterial contamination detected in rural communities with older systems; lead leaching into the water that passed through pipes in Boston.52 The Safe Drinking Water Act laid out minimum quality standards and developed assistance programs to help drinking water systems meet them. Significantly, as the people of Flint would come to know well, it depended upon utilities to self-monitor and self-report.53
Ultimate responsibility for these new laws belonged to the brand-new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which President Nixon created with an executive order in 1970.54 In the decades since, the spectacular recovery of waterways all over the country, including the Great Lakes and the Cuyahoga, Chicago, and Flint Rivers, has proved its worth.
In Michigan, the sprawling Detroit Water and Sewerage Department became the largest supplier of drinking water. It served about four million citizens, or nearly 40 percent of the state’s population.55 DWSD customers lived not only in Detroit, but also in the suburbs, exurbs, and outlying rural towns. In fact, suburban growth was largely made possible because new towns were able to hook onto the Detroit system, providing them with essential infrastructure before they had the resources to build their own.
Flint’s consumption of Detroit water began with a deal made in the spring of 1964. At the time, nearly two hundred thousand residents, and about a thousand people outside the city limits, were connected to the city’s own water system, which used the Flint River.56 It withdrew about 36 million gallons from the river every day, and not just to provide residents with something to drink: about 60 percent of the total was absorbed by Flint’s mighty industrial plants, which were then at their roaring peak.
It seemed that Flint’s water needs would only grow. Civic leaders worried about whether the river could support the population and industries for decades into the future. Or would its limited capacity stunt development? For years, there were passionate debates about what to do, and it came down to this choice: Flint could either sign on with the Detroit water department, which would build a pipeline to deliver treated water from the seemingly unlimited supply of Lake Huron, or build its own pipeline to Lake Huron and treat the water itself at its city plant.
Outrage over a corruption scandal effectively killed the plan for the city to construct its own pipeline. While Flint was weighing its options, three people with insider knowledge were charged with buying land where a pumping station would be built and then reselling it to the city for a personal profit.57 As the case was playing out, Flint’s City Commission, as the council was then called, voted 7–2 to join Detroit’s system. Going forward, the DWSD would provide wholesale water to Flint, which in turn delivered it to local residents and to a number of Genesee County suburbs. Flint also provided water to the GM plants that were increasingly being built in the suburbs.58 The taxes paid by GM would fund the development of these young communities, which would eventually compete with the core city for residents and business.
A few years after the deal was signed, when Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh dedicated the new connection to Flint, he emphasized its public-spirited symbolism. “This marks a further demonstration of a regional problem being solved by a regional government tool,” Cavanagh said at the 1967 ceremonial event.
“We have gone beyond the stage where a community can think no further than its own boundaries,” the mayor continued. “We must be concerned with our neighboring cities. When the problems become too large then we must gather together in common interest to find a mutually beneficial answer.”59
Half a century later, that deal was dissolved. The men in jewel-toned ties gathered in Flint to commemorate its end, toasting the virtues of going it alone in the moments before they turned the water off.
Copyright © 2018 by Anna Clark
