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Water Pollution In Flint, Michigan

Decent Essays

Worried about terrorism? Thousands of young children in Flint, Michigan have been poisoned by their state government’s austerity moves and may have life-long damage.

Background

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has been tough on “waste” and is a big fan of restructuring, having controversially set up a system of emergency managers to oversee troubled communities in lieu of locally elected officials. One of the latest victims of this process is Flint, Michigan, a rust-belt ruin, financially distressed since the decline of its auto industry.

In April, 2014, Flint’s state-appointed emergency manager changed the city’s water supply from Detroit’s Lake Huron treated water with anti-corrosives to water from Flint River, in a poorly thought out cost-saving maneuver. They did not add anti-corrosives to the Flint system, as that would have cost $100/day.

Dirty water spilling from a bottle - courtesy Ildar Sagdejev
Dirty water spilling from a bottle – courtesy Ildar Sagdejev

Residents rapidly voiced complaints about the smell, taste and rusty appearance of the water. They also raised health concerns including rashes, hair loss and mood changes. Even General Motors stopped using the Flint water, “saying it was rusting its parts.”

That summer, there was an E. coli advisory. The town added chlorine to try to insure adequate …show more content…

The major sources of lead here were gasoline, paint chips and water from old plumbing. After lead was removed from gasoline and paint, blood lead levels (BLL) in children decreased on average from 16 mcg/dL to less than 3 mcg/dL. Residual lead persists in the environment, however. A toxic level is currently defined as 5 mcg/dL. In U.S. children age 1-5, the prevalence of BLLs >10 mcg/dL decreased from 88% to 4.4% between 1976 and 1994 and further dropped to 0.8% by 2010. Yet there are still almost half a million children in the U.S. with levels >5

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