Justice for Flint May Finally Be Near

The only time – so far as I know – that we ever scooped a major national news magazine was in January 2016, when we wrote about the Flint MI water crisis nearly a week before the story appeared on that magazine's cover. 

Flint was, at the time, an economically depressed city with a population of approximately 100,000. It is located on the Flint River in Genesee County and, until 2014, the county bought its water from Detroit, 66 miles away, which took it from Lake Huron. Reportedly to save $19 million per year, the state had the county start taking its water from the adjacent Flint River.

Shortly thereafter, the residents noticed that the appearance, odor, and taste of the water had deteriorated and, although testing revealed the water contained high levels of lead and iron, it was months after learning the water was unsafe to drink before either the state or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admitted the problem and took action. By then, there were cases where the lead levels had exceeded federal drinking-water standards by thousands of parts per billion, many children had lead poisoning, and the water was being blamed for cases of Legionnaire’s Disease. 

In January 2016, a state of emergency for Genesee County was declared and members of the Michigan National Guard began distributing bottled water to residents. As a proud Hokie, I was pleased to note that it was a Virginia Tech engineering professor (Marc Edwards) researcher and his grad students who used the Freedom of Information Act to expose the cover-up by government officials. That, of course, wasn’t the end of the story. In a related Clark’s Remarks essay a year-and-a-half later, I noted that more than 8,000 Flint residents, many of whom were still drinking the bottled water provided by the National Guard, were being threatened with having their water service – which they could still use for washing and lawn watering – shut off for failure to pay their water bills.

In 2018, Michigan voters elected Dana Nessel to be their Attorney General. When she took office in 2019, she appointed Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy to lead a criminal investigation into the 2014-2016 Flint water crisis.  

Although long overdue, it now appears that Flint residents may finally see some justice.

This month, as a result of that investigation, nine former Michigan officials, including ex-Gov. Rick Snyder, were all criminally charged. The most prominent, Snyder, was charged with two counts of Willful Neglect of Duty and was released from custody on $10,000 bond and the condition that he does not leave Michigan until his next hearing.