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| The Flint River in August 2014. High levels on lead in drinking water have endangered the health of residents. Photo: George Thomas | FlickrCC. |
For the last two years, the city of Flint, Michigan has been facing a water crisis. Specifically, a plan to direct water to the city from Lake Huron, instead of the Detroit water supply, has backfired horrendously. The problem isn’t Lake Huron that system isn’t even in place yet.
The crisis began due to a cavalier effort to cut costs; the city left the Detroit water supply and started using water from the Flint River, which isn’t drinkable without a lot of effort. To purify it, they used chlorine, a common practice, but that chlorine ate away at Flint’s old pipes, which released lead into the drinking water.
Despite evidence that this was a bad idea, the project went ahead and now many people in Flint, which is a predominantly poor black city, have to deal with lead in their drinking water, something that we’ve known is dangerous since the time of ancient Rome.
As Flint struggles to fix the situation, with no help from the state government, United Nations experts and others are looking at the situation and seeing a violation of residents’ fundamental human rights.
For the last two years, residents of Flint have not had access to safe drinking water, a basic human right, and that’s because of poor decisions on the part of their local and state government.
Governments that have claimed nothing is wrong despite the obvious presence of dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water. It’s the kind of thing that we expect to occur in third world countries—not in the United States, but here it is.
Of course, Flint isn’t the only place in the U.S. where this can happen or has happened because aging infrastructure and cost-cutting shenanigans can cause all kinds of dangerous problems. Those same U.N. experts are trying to find ways to prevent this from happening elsewhere.
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