{"id":1898,"date":"2019-05-05T12:19:44","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T11:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?p=1898"},"modified":"2019-05-05T12:19:44","modified_gmt":"2019-05-05T11:19:44","slug":"collateral-damage-in-flint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/collateral-damage-in-flint\/","title":{"rendered":"Collateral damage in Flint"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and the effects of lead poisoning are also slow and pernicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city of Flint\u2019s water crisis began in April 2014. In a \ncost-saving measure to save around $5m the state-appointed city manager \nchanged the city\u2019s water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage \nDepartment water, sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River, to \nwater from the Flint River. General Motors used the river as its private\n dumping ground for decades; it is highly polluted and highly acidic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Typically, water in mass systems at the city and wider level is \ntreated with corrosion inhibiters, chemical compounds which reduce the \nlikelihood of pipes corroding. Officials failed to apply corrosion \ninhibitors to the Flint River water, in defiance of federal law, causing\n lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply. Michigan state \nofficials insisted that the water was safe, ignoring calls for the water\n supply to be switched back to the Detroit system on the grounds that \nswitching back would be too expensive. It wasn\u2019t until September 2015 \nthat a report revealed that 40 percent of Flint homes had dangerously \nelevated lead levels, and declared Flint water unfit to drink. \nEventually in October 2015 the state finally agreed to switch Flint back\n to the Lake Huron supply, but the damage had already been done. Many \npeople had got sick. Potentially thousands of children were exposed to \nhazardous levels of lead. The full extent of the damage is still unclear\n and isn\u2019t likely to be known for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does lead do to the human body? Infants and small children can \nsuffer brain and nervous system damage, weakened immune systems and \ngeneral physical collapse that can lead to death. Pregnant women have a \nhigher risk of stillbirth or miscarriage. A raft of studies has pretty \nmuch concluded that lead can cause cancer. It causes cardiovascular \ndiseases and kidney damage which, like cancer, can also kill. Five parts\n of lead per billion are a concern. 5,000 parts per billion is \nconsidered toxic waste. From April 2014 until October 2015 the people of\n Flint were drinking water with up to 13,000 parts per billion of lead \nin it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Michigan\u2019s Department of Environmental Quality officials urged people\n worried about lead in Flint\u2019s drinking water to \u2018relax,\u2019 saying that \nthere was no \u2018broad problem\u2019 with contamination. They described the \nwhistleblower EPA official, Miguel Del Toral, whose draft report \ninitially alerted lead-poisoned Flint residents to their great danger, \nas a \u2018rogue employee.\u2019 They also attacked the work of Virginia Tech \nexpert Marc Edwards and his team of graduate students, which revealed \nthat some Flint tap water measured nearly 2.5 times more lead \ncontamination than the EPA\u2019s hazardous waste designation level. They \ncast doubts upon Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, director of the pediatric \nresidency program at Flint\u2019s Hurley Hospital whose research showed that \nafter the switch to untreated Flint River drinking water, blood lead \nlevels in children doubled, or even tripled. Residents were left to \ndrink poisoned water for months despite warnings from experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edwards explained, \u2018In Flint the agencies paid to protect these people weren\u2019t solving the problem. They were the problem\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are presently court cases against former and current state government officials. On April the 1st<\/sup>,\n US District Court Judge Judith Levy declared that former Governor Rick \nSnyder can be sued by residents in Flint. Levy wrote in her ruling:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Plaintiffs plausibly state that the Governor acted indifferently to \nthe risk of harm they faced, demonstrating a callous disregard for their\n right to bodily integrity. This indifference manifested itself in two \nways. Initially, the Governor was indifferent because instead of \nmitigating the risk of harm caused by the contaminated water, he covered\n it up. In private, he worried about the need to return Flint to DWSD \nwater and the political implications of the crisis. But in public, he \ndenied all knowledge, despite being aware of the developing crisis\u2026 As a\n result, plaintiffs were lured into a false sense of security. They \ncould have taken protective measures, if only they had known what the \nGovernor knew. Instead, the Governor misled them into assuming that \nnothing was wrong. Governor Snyder\u2019s administration even encouraged them\n to continue to drink and bathe in the water.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People in Flint and their children were merely collateral damage in a\n larger war. Which war? The class war of the capitalists against \neverybody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ALJO<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The wheels of justice turn slowly, and the effects of lead poisoning are also slow and pernicious. The city of Flint\u2019s water crisis began in April 2014. In a cost-saving measure to save around $5m the state-appointed city manager changed the city\u2019s water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water, sourced from Lake…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1965,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}