Flint residents urged to have water tested for lead levels

“We never imagined this in our wildest dreams but it just goes to show what people can do when we put our hands and our heads together”, said Alderman Leslie Hairston. May the frustrating events in Flint galvanize our own community against practices that harm the river, and may we seek opportunities to understand our relationship with the river.

The Michigan Legislature voted Thursday to direct another $28 million to address Flint’s water emergency, allocating money for bottled water, medical assessments and other costs in the city struggling with a lead-contaminated supply.

For residents, however, it took researchers uncovering elevated levels of lead in children’s bloodstreams for a lead advisory to finally be issued in September of 2015.

She said people with levels over 150 ppb are being notified and their water is being retested.

Flash to Flint: Last January, city residents snatched up 200 cases of bottled water within the first 30 minutes of a giveaway program.

The federal rule dates to 1991, when the Environmental Protection Agency limited the amount of lead in drinking water. For more than a year, lead leached from the pipes because the city failed to add standard anti-corrosion chemicals to the water.

“The city of Norwalk applies sodium hydroxide and polyphosphates to the water to ensure it’s stable, and not corrosive to plumbing”.

“You can’t count on basic infrastructure like water being safe”. The coating provides a protective barrier between the water and the metals in the plumbing. At least 45 Flint children have already tested positive for damaging levels of lead in their blood, with many more cases likely not yet confirmed.

Caleb Bush, a spokesman for the DTMB, insisted staff was not told water was unsafe to drink and that the goal of the coolers was to offer employees a choice. The city had previously been using Lake Huron water treated in Detroit. According to a group of Virginia Tech researchers (VT), these lead levels are high enough to meet the EPA’s definition of “toxic waste”. “The most recent testing occurred in the summer of 2013”, Schaffer said. What Flint is seeing, however, are some levels higher than 150 parts per billion – in other words, what can safely be removed by those filters.

Local officials say while the concerns are valid, extensive testing reveals that the issue in Flint is not being repeated locally. That includes the 18-month period during which the city switched its water source while under state financial management until it reconnected to Detroits system because of lead contamination blamed on state regulatory failures. Thousands of children have been potentially exposed to lead, which can cause brain and nerve damage.

Walters asked Dr. Marc Edwards to test the water after she did some research online.

Flint residents are now warned to drink only filtered or bottled water because of lead contamination.