1,000 days and counting: still no clean drinking water in Flint, MI

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Thursday marks exactly 1,000 days since clean drinking water last flowed from the faucets in Flint, Mich., where on April 24, 2014, state and local officials ceremoniously began supplying the city with improperly treated water from the Flint River.

Although the ensuing water crisis has long since faded from national headlines, for Flint residents, the ramifications of this disastrous, short-sighted attempt at cost saving are still very much a daily reality.

According to both both government officials and environmental researchers, there has been a steady decline in the overall levels of lead and other bacteria in Flint’s drinking water since it returned to Detroit’s system in October 2015. Still, the immense damage caused by pumping improperly treated river water through the city’s aged lead pipes is far from fixed.

Since March, the city has replaced lead service lines for just 780 homes in Flint. At a town hall meeting last week, officials estimated that it will take approximately three years to completely replace all of the city’s lead water-service lines — a project for which they have not yet secured funding.

In the meantime, Flint residents were encouraged to continue using filters and bottled water at home. This is a habit that few are likely to be able to shake even after they’ve been told it’s safe to do so.

“Telling people the water was safe when it wasn’t created this disaster in the first place,” Pastor Allen Overton of the Flint-based Concerned Pastors for Social Action said in a recent statement. CPSA, along with the Natural Resource Defense Council, the ACLU of Michigan and Flint resident Melissa Mays, are currently suing the city of Flint and the state of Michigan under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. “Given the history of the State’s deception about the water, I’d hope they’d be proceeding with more caution, rather than making statements that may worsen the community’s deep distrust of the government.”

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