After the city of Flint,
Michigan changed its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River in April
2014, the quality of water concerned residents. Some reports showed that the
percentage of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood was doubled.
Figure 1 shows children’s blood lead levels change from 2013 to 2015 in nine
districts of Flint. Lead is a neurotoxin, which has no “safe level of
exposure”. Newer research asserts that it may “increases the incidence of attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities and potentially violent
behavior.” And lead can also affect DNA,
carrying damage to children of this generation and the next.
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| Figure 1 |
The Michigan Department
of Environmental Quality conducted a study to show the public that the water
was safe. However, months later, under the insistence of local residents, Marc Edwards, who is
a national expert on corrosion control and had solved the water crisis in D.C., was engaged in the study. He with his team, “Flint Water
Study” finally confirmed that the government had underestimated the problem.
The water had toxic waste, which contained a high concentration of lead.
Further, the government didn’t use the federally required corrosion control to
prevent the lead from leaching out of the old pipes.
The City had trouble
collecting the samples, so they dropped the requirements and collected only 60
of 100 samples from all districts of Flint. Additionally, the city asked
residents to clean the system the night before and test the water six hours
after it had been sitting. They also used bottles with small necks to collect
the water sample, all of which may lower the concentration of lead. Following
these standards, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality concluded
that the water was safe.
However, Marc Edwards,
with his team, did a more comprehensive test, which included 271 samples in
each of the city’s ZIP codes. They tested the water three times in different
conditions in order to increase the reliability of the study. The results
showed that 20% of the water had lead levels higher than 15 ppb, which based on
the federal law, should "trigger public warning."
In Figure 2, we can
evaluate the different representations of samplings carried out by the
Department of Environmental Quality and the Flint Water Study’s Analysis. In
the first case the sample was small, considering only two out of the ten wards
in the city, while in the second map we can see that the sample reached almost
all of Flint.
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| Figure 2 |
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