Moving Beyond the First Rough Draft: The Emerging History of the Flint Water Crisis

If contemporary news reports about the Flint water crisis constituted the "first rough draft" of that calamity's distressing history, then the 2018 publication of Anna Clark's powerful book The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy marked the completion of a second, and significantly revised, version of that story. By now, the outlines of the first draft of the history of Flint's water disaster are familiar to millions. According to most news accounts, the trouble began in April 2014, when the city government—then under the tight grip of an unelected "emergency manager" appointed by Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder—canceled its longstanding water service agreement with Detroit in order to affiliate with a new regional water authority that was constructing a pipeline to Lake Huron. The city's emergency managers, with support from Mayor Dayne Walling and numerous other local elected officials, opted to use the Flint River as a temporary water source while the pipeline was under construction. The switch was part of a larger, sharply contested plan to balance the budget and impose severe austerity in this impoverished, majority-black city of one hundred thousand people.

Soon after the switch, however, residents began to complain about the odor, taste, and color of the water. Late in the summer of 2014, city officials issued three separate boil water advisories after discovering coliform bacteria in the water on Flint's west side. At around the same time, numerous water users across the city reported suffering from hair loss, skin rashes, and other mysterious illnesses. There was also a significant spike in local cases of Legionnaires' disease in 2014 and 2015. Researchers later connected the outbreak to the city's drinking water. The problem, as investigators ultimately determined, was that water from the highly acidic Flint River was corroding the city's aging, lead-laden pipes. Because state and local officials had neglected to implement a corrosion control program, the pipes had leached lead, copper, bacteria and other toxins into the drinking water. Government officials brushed off a chorus of complaints from local residents and allowed the contamination to continue for over a year and a half. By the time Governor Snyder announced the switch back to the Detroit system in October 2015, Flint's tainted water had caused incalculable harm to the city and its people. In addition to the spate of Legionnaires' disease cases, which killed at least twelve people locally, researchers reported that the number of young children with elevated blood lead levels had doubled. Moreover, the consumption of Flint's poisoned water left thousands of residents citywide suffering from myriad health problems including pulmonary disorders, psychological distress, and child developmental delays, to name but a few.

Journalists who covered the Flint story as it unfolded were quick to point out that the city's water trouble stemmed from a tragic case of government mismanagement and political malfeasance. As part of that effort, they documented the puzzling failure to provide federally mandated corrosion control; the water's deleterious health effects on local residents; the disdain with which state officials responded to citizen activists; and, perhaps most seriously, the months-long coverup of evidence that pointed to the severity of Flint's infrastructure and public health disasters. Journalists and photographers covering the developments in Flint won well-deserved acclaim for their work, including the Michigan Press Association's Journalist of the Year Award, a Michigan Associated Press Media Editors award for investigative reporting, and even a Pulitzer Prize nomination for feature photography.

By and large, however, these first drafts of the story of Flint's water emergency were insufficiently historical in the sense that they failed to address the longer-term structural forces underpinning the catastrophe—everything from deindustrialization and racial segregation to suburbanization and metropolitan fragmentation. Clark's compelling new book—part of a wave of scholarship and investigative reporting...