Nearly one in six of the city’s homes has been abandoned. The city found itself in a precipitous decline: Flint’s population has since plummeted to just 100,000 people, a majority of whom are African-American, and about 45 percent of its residents live below the poverty line. But the 1980s put the brakes on that period of prosperity, as rising oil prices and auto imports resulted in shuttered auto plants and laid-off workers, many of whom eventually relocated. In the mid-20th century, Flint-the birthplace of General Motors-was the flourishing home to nearly 200,000 people, many employed by the booming automobile industry. Not surprisingly, the Flint River is rumored to have caught fire-twice.Īs the industries along the river’s shores evolved, so too did the city’s economy. The waterway has also received raw sewage from the city’s waste treatment plant, agricultural and urban runoff, and toxics from leaching landfills. For more than a century, the Flint River, which flows through the heart of town, has served as an unofficial waste disposal site for treated and untreated refuse from the many local industries that have sprouted along its shores, from carriage and car factories to meatpacking plants and lumber and paper mills. Long before the recent crisis garnered national headlines, the city of Flint was eminently familiar with water woes. It was ultimately the determined, relentless efforts of the Flint community-with the support of doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizen activists-that shined a light on the city’s severe mismanagement of its drinking water and forced a reckoning over how such a scandal could have been allowed to happen. Later studies would reveal that the contaminated water was also contributing to a doubling-and in some cases, tripling-of the incidence of elevated blood lead levels in the city’s children, imperiling the health of its youngest generation. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, a state-established body, concluded that the poor governmental response to the Flint crisis was a “result of systemic racism.” Inadequate treatment and testing of the water resulted in a series of major water quality and health issues for Flint residents-issues that were chronically ignored, overlooked, and discounted by government officials even as complaints mounted that the foul-smelling, discolored, and off-tasting water piped into Flint homes for 18 months was causing skin rashes, hair loss, and itchy skin. A story of environmental injustice and bad decision making, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, began in 2014, when the city switched its drinking water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-saving move.
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