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While Americans take clean drinking water for granted, the residents of Flint, Michigan currently lack such a luxury. The failure of state and federal environmental officials has placed the city’s residents at risk for lead poisoning as a result of an attempt two years ago to save the city money by acquiring drinking water from the nearby Flint River instead of from Detroit. Since 40% of Flint’s residents are poor and more than half are African-Americans, community activists allege that Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder and other state officials turned a blind eye to resident concerns on racial and socioeconomic grounds. The scandal has caused the resignation of the director of Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 director and Michigan’s state attorney general and the Department of Justice are looking into the filing of criminal charges. The crisis creates a significant test of Snyder’s leadership as he must solve this problem while also facing a work stoppage by Detroit’s public school teachers over the condition of their schools.
This topic brief will provide some background on what caused the Flint water crisis, analyze the responses to the crisis, and then highlight why the Flint water crisis is a situation with national significance.
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