What’s Gone Right With The Flint Water Crisis

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has repeatedly apologized for the toxic water crisis in Flint, heads have rolled and the government has pledged millions to help city kids recover.

Although the state dismissed concerns about Flint’s bad water for more than a year — water that is still unsafe to drink — the apologies, resignations and pledges of assistance shouldn’t be taken for granted.

The Flint fallout unfolded dramatically differently than a similar crisis more than 10 years ago. Between 2001 and 2004, toxic water poisoned potentially tens of thousands of Washington, D.C. children. But officials there said nobody got hurt and questioned whether lead poisoning through water was even possible — and they basically got away with it.

“Not only did we not receive support for our children, but to this day we have received no official acknowledgement of harm,” Yanna Lambrinidou, a D.C. resident and founder of a nonprofit called Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives, said in an interview. “We have received no official apology.”

Lead can cause decreased intelligence, stunted growth and behavioral problems in children. But governments can get away with water lead partly because it has no taste or smell, poisoning symptoms vary widely and tracing any one person’s medical problems to lead can be very difficult.

Gretchen Mikeska lives in a hundred-year-old D.C. house that received water from a lead service line during D.C.’s water crisis. In 2003, she said, a test by her pediatrician showed five micrograms of lead per deciliter in her baby daughter’s blood.

Back then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considered 10 micrograms to be the level of concern, but in 2012 the CDC lowered the threshold to five. Public health experts generally agree there is no safe level of lead in blood.

Mikeska sends her daughter, now 13, to a special school for kids with language-based learning differences. She doesn’t know whether lead affected her daughter because it’s not possible to know.

“Based on my experience, what will be the most troubling to parents in the long run is always wondering how life would be different if lead contaminated water had not been a part of the early lives of these children,” Mikeska said in an email.

The District’s water started leaching lead from city pipes in 2001 following a treatment change that accidentally increased the water’s corrosiveness — essentially the same thing that went wrong in Flint. But here’s what was different in the District: after the leaded water belatedly came to the public’s attention in 2004, the CDC said testing showed city kids hadn’t suffered high levels of lead in their blood. 

Officials took the CDC’s assurance and ran with it. A city task force said in its final report that “there is scant scientific evidence to suggest a direct connection between lead in drinking water and lead absorption into the body,” which was untrue.

Though some parents and experts remained skeptical, the outcry over D.C.’s lead crisis died down. Then, in 2009, a team led by Virginia Tech civil engineering professor Marc Edwards published research showing that District children had, in fact, suffered elevated blood lead levels when lead spiked in the city’s water. The CDC added asterisks to its report, saying it had been based on incomplete information, and agency director Tom Frieden admitted in 2010 that the report “left room for misinterpretation.”