Just Politics

[arizona1]

So, please, don't browse a NY Times article and try and tell me what happened.

F-off! As disgusting as AZ is, we have never had to appoint an emergency manager who decided to poison us.

Who's to blame for poisoning of Flint's water?

THE COST OF SAVING MONEY

Flint’s now infamous water problems stem from an ill-fated attempt to save money by disconnecting from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, which had provided the city with water from Lake Huron for decades.

Faced with budget deficits, Flint was ordered into receivership in 2011 by Gov. Rick Snyder. The move enabled him to appoint a series of emergency managers to run the troubled city, which had seen its population shrink to 100,000, from double that figure in the 1960s. Today, 41 percent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line in the struggling city, which is 57 percent black, 36 percent white and 4 percent Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

One of those emergency managers, Darnell Earley, was in charge of the city in April 2014, when officials made the disastrous decision to switch water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The move was supposed to be an interim measure through 2016, when a new pipeline would let the city connect with the Karegnondi Water Authority, which drew its water from Lake Huron.

Government officials repeatedly assured Flint residents that the water was safe. In fact, however, the Flint River was so corrosive it ate away at the pipes in the city, causing lead to leach into the water supply, poisoning the city’s residents—including 9,000 children younger than 6. While lead can be toxic to anyone, its effects on young children are particularly devastating. The well-documented array of symptoms caused by lead poisoning in children includes damage to the nervous system, bones, kidneys and hearing, as well as speech and language impairments.

Later, during state legislative hearings on the crisis, it emerged that Flint’s water hadn’t been treated with chemicals that would have made it less corrosive to pipes, a fix that would have cost only $150 a day. But before anti-corrosion chemicals could be added, the city needed to upgrade its equipment, which would have cost an estimated $8 million.
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/flint_water_crisis_whos_to_blame