Flint estimated it would save $5 million over two years when Darnell Early, Emergency Manager at the time, switched Flint’s water source from Detroit Water to the Flint River. Almost immediately the water changed color and residents complained about the smell.
Eastern Michigan University has a community of students and faculty from Flint. Whether they still live there or not, they have been affected by the water crisis. Stevie Newton is an EMU student majoring in public relations. Her family still lives in Flint.
“Since I don't live there anymore, I don't have the habits they do,” Newton said. “So I go to use the water and I get instructed not to.”
Although the water is filtered, Flint has an old web of water pipes made of lead, which the new water corroded faster than expected, so now lead comes out of the faucets of residents.
Lolita Cummings-Carson is a public relations professor at EMU. She grew up in Flint and still goes there once a week.
“I think the media's covered it pretty accurately,” she said. “I think they've shown a great deal of the suffering and the fear of the residents. I think they've done a wonderful job of uncovering information that had been held back from the public on what government agencies did or did not do.”
But not everyone agrees. EMU alumnus Eric Sippert called the coverage abysmal.
“It took a significant amount of time before local news began taking residents’ complaints seriously even though there were clear signs that was something was wrong, like GM switching their water source quite early on because it was corroding the car parts,” Sippert said in an interview via email.
Sippert went on to say that once studies on the water quality came back, the news coverage did pick it up, but it took until the start of this year.
Marc Edwards is a water safety activist who is not affiliated with Eastern. He is a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech and worked with a similar campaign against a water crisis in Washington D.C. in 2004.
He had 300 Flint water samples sent to his laboratory. Then he received another 277 from a social action group Water You Fight For? and several hundred from others. Edwards found that 40.1 percent of the samples had lead levels of over the 5 parts per billion that the Environmental Protection Agency says is the absolute maximum acceptable level.
Newton said that the media was just covering the facts they were handed, and weren’t “digging into the families affected like the kids, going into the schools and the changes there.”
This has been linked to symptoms felt around the city. Hair is falling out, children are developing learning disabilities and the full effects might not be known for years.
Former EMU student body president Desmond Miller is from Flint. He is one of the lucky ones, whose home doesn't run off of city water, but he also has family members whose homes do run off of city water. Like Newton and Carson-Cummings, Miller put blame on Snyder and the former emergency manager.
“Even though helping Flint is obviously the morally right thing to do, speaking completely political[y], he missed an opportunity for the Republican Party to be shown as heroes and lock in votes for the 2016 elections,” Miller said in an emailed interview.
On Feb. 12, Governor Rick Snyder pledged to release all documents to and from his administration, to prove his transparency and that he did not know how bad the situation was. The documents he released had so much redacted information that they led to more criticism for lack of transparency.
“They did not do their job at all,” Newton said. “They were not responsible. I think the precautions that they were supposed to be taking didn't follow through, so it was just a big cycle of mistakes.”
Flint has been inundated by volunteers around the country, bringing filters and bottled water to give to residents. Cummings-Carson explained how her aunt has to boil bottled water in order to make it hot enough to bathe with. When that same aunt came to her house for dinner, she went to get water several times and was startled to remember that she didn't need a filter to use Cummings-Carson’s sink.
Unlike the majority of people who believe the water crisis has been brushed aside for so long because the city consists of mostly African Americans, Cummings-Carson believes that it has more to do with income.
“It could have been a city of Hispanics, Asians, or Martians; but if they were poor, the same thing would have happened,” she said. “I don't think it’s black and white – I think it's economic.”
“There's a lot of rumors about it being a genocide,” Newton said. “I don't personally believe it has anything to do with race. I just think it's a collection of misfortunate events.”
Congress had begun hearings on the Flint crisis. Meanwhile, Snyder hired not one, but two public relations firms at tax payers’ expense. He already has a communications department. Cummings-Carson criticized this in an editorial to the PR academic journal, PR Tactics, which is yet to be published.
“Snyder, along with the entire cast of characters who contributed to this crisis, should have consulted ethical PR counsel and then made decisions that could have averted the current disaster,” Cummings-Carson wrote.
The State House of Representatives approved $30 million to help pay for overdue city water bills. There were over 5,000 delinquent accounts, according to the Detroit Free Press. Flint City Mayor Karen Weaver was elected last year, campaigning on the water crisis. She has called for the state to replace the pipes. Estimates on how much it could actually cost anywhere up to $1.5 billion.
“It's obviously going to be a tough road, because right now they have a problem that no one knows how to solve,” Cummings-Carson said. She said that the progress that downtown had been making, including the University of Michigan-Flint campus, have been hampered by the lack of safe water.
