Lessons of Flint

No one can doubt that a similar public health crisis would never have been allowed to happen in Grosse Pointe, Forest Hills, West Bloomfield or other more affluent Michigan communities. A poisoned water supply and public officials who refuse to lift a finger to do anything about it are part of the price Flint residents pay for being poor and black.

The Baltimore Sun Editorial Page

The lessons of Flint 1-23-16 (sic - either mistyped date or they are printing this on Saturday but already posted online)

It's been nearly two years since residents of Flint, Mich., began noticing that the water from their taps was brown and carried a foul odor. People got rashes and sores from drinking it. Some people's hair fell out, others threw up after swallowing it. Worst of all, doctors noticed an alarming rise of lead levels in the blood of city youngsters — enough to cause irreversible brain damage and other serious health and behavioral problems.

Yet it wasn't until last month that state officials in Michigan, who had taken over managing the community's water supply after the city fell into receivership in 2011, finally stopped insisting that the people of Flint — a majority black city where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line — were all crazy and that their water was perfectly safe. Until then, their advice had been, more or less, "Drink up, and stop complaining!"

Now, with the release last week of hundreds of emails detailing state officials' responses to citizens' complaints about the situation, it turns out that the water in Flint was anything but safe. In fact, not only was it safe, but it contained enough toxic chemicals to melt the lead solder out of the city's ancient water pipes and poison the drinking water in a city of 100,000 residents. Worst of all, state officials appear to have known about the problem all along, yet they did nothing. Given the state's indifference to the alarms that had been raised over the safety of Flint's water supply, it took some gall on the part of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to ask President Barack Obama on Wednesday to declare the city a federal disaster area ...

More here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-flint-water-20160123-story.html