What the Eyes Don't See_A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

  After Dr. Reynolds finished, Kirk described the resolution that his board had passed that morning calling for a health advisory.

  The mayor was finally ready to talk water. “We’ve just this morning had a meeting about this with the EPA and DEQ,” he said. “And they’ve told us there’s no corrosion issue. It has to do with old pipes in residents’ homes and couldn’t be helped.” Something inside me wilted. He was copping out already. Okay, maybe there is lead in the water, he was saying, but it isn’t the city’s, the state’s, or the feds’ responsibility—or mine. It’s the people’s fault. I couldn’t help but think how this echoed the lead industry’s blaming of victims. Then he mentioned the prohibitive cost of switching back to Detroit water. Flint just couldn’t afford that.

  “Besides,” he said, “isn’t everybody in Flint already flushing their water?”

  I pressed my lips tight together to make sure I didn’t inadvertently blurt out an expletive or scream. Without visibly turning my head, I caught the eyes of Kirk, then Jenny. Jenny’s mouth was agape. I could see they were as disturbed as I was.

  Flushing? I was a pediatrician with an environmental health background, and even I didn’t know to flush water after prolonged periods of nonuse. And did anyone think Flint residents, who were paying the highest water rates in the country, were going to waste water for five long minutes of flushing?

  Howard Croft went next, attempting to back up the mayor. His job and reputation were on the line, and that was all I was hearing, or thought I was hearing. He was like Gonzo the Muppet. He opened his mouth, and no point came out.

  I spoke up again. “This is a crisis. This is an emergency.” I talked about needing bottled water for the infants in the city, or premixed formula. And the water had to be switched back immediately.

  “That’s impossible!” Henderson had been sitting at the table for almost an hour and hadn’t said a word, but now she finally spoke up, with unshakable certainty. She made it clear that there was absolutely no money for Flint to switch back to Detroit water. “The pipeline to Detroit has already been sold.” She shot me a disapproving why-are-you-wasting-my-time-with-this-crap look.

  She reiterated the information that she and the mayor had received on their conference call with MDEQ and the EPA that morning. She believed what they had told her and was sticking to that. “They say there are no corrosion issues,” she said. “The water tested fine at the source—”

  “The source isn’t the problem!” I interrupted, then began to describe why testing at the source was irrelevant. I had taken a crash course in water treatment only in the last couple of weeks, I explained, but I had consulted a former EPA water treatment scientist (Elin) and had met with Marc Edwards. The second I said Marc’s name, I felt a blast of arctic air from Henderson and Croft.

  Once everyone else at the meeting had a chance to weigh in, including Dean Dean from the speakerphone, expressing gratitude for my study and the presentation, I gave the mayor an ultimatum—delivered as kindly and benignly as possible.

  It was pretty simple. If he wouldn’t stand with me and make the announcement that there was lead in the blood of the kids of Flint, then we would do it without him. Kirk, Melany, Senator Ananich, Andy, and I had agreed on this step going into the meeting. Andy had been adamant about issuing a deadline for the mayor, and he wanted it to be Wednesday, September 23, at noon. I went along with it. It was an arbitrary deadline, but it gave us something to work with, and it gave the mayor’s office two days to get their act together.

  “We’ll hold off until we hear from you,” I said, “but it has to be by Wednesday at noon. We’d love to make this announcement with you.”

  The mayor nodded collegially, as if he were down with that. “But Wednesday might be tough,” he said, suddenly reversing course. “I’m going to be in D.C. on Wednesday to meet the new pope.”

  Huh? I looked over at Andy and Senator Ananich, then across the table at Jenny. Did he really just say he was meeting the pope?

  “This couldn’t be more urgent,” I went on, ignoring his bizarre non sequitur. “We need to get moving and declare a health advisory as soon as possible, so we can get some proper action by the feds and the state. Every day counts. That’s why we need to hear by Wednesday.”

  Henderson grimaced, then looked away.

  “This could be a win-win,” I said, trying not to lose it. “We could stand together and make the announcement.”

  “Okay,” the mayor said.

  Okay, what? “We’d like to hear from you within two days, by Wednesday,” I said again, in case he didn’t catch it the first few times. “After that, we will share my research publicly.”

  “Okay,” the mayor said again, nodding and beginning to rise. We all stood, said our goodbyes, and dispersed as quickly as we’d arrived. We were busy people with busy careers and lives. Some of us were focused on the kids in Flint. Some of us were looking forward to meeting the new pope.

  Was he planning to bring back some holy water?

  * * *

  —

  TEXTS BEGAN FLYING AS soon as we left the building. Senator Ananich and Andy and Kirk believed the meeting had gone as badly as could be imagined—they were extremely disappointed. Mayor Walling was clearly of no use, we decided, and we had to assume he wouldn’t be with us. We decided to plan a press conference for Thursday, September 24, without him. We still hoped he’d join us but had to start working around him. There was no reason to vilify him, we agreed, or turn him into the enemy—he had no power, being mayor in name only. The truth was that the citizens of Flint didn’t have a democratically elected leader. They had a figurehead.

  Over the course of the day and night, Andy called me repeatedly, sometimes conferencing everybody in, to coordinate a plan. He was a tall, relatively young guy and a political strategist to his bones—always two steps ahead, always aware of political implications, and inordinately good at swearing. A know-it-all, he loved telling us all, including his boss, Senator Ananich, what to do.

  We each had a role to play. Senator Ananich was to work the legislative end. Kirk was to deal with the local media—now already circling the story after the GFHC resolution—and work with Dr. Reynolds to bring medical and health professionals on board. I was to finalize my study and presentation, while continuing to pester the state for a data set for all of Genesee County.

  My tendency, when things don’t go well, is to revisit my own work and see how it could be better. Was my presentation good enough, compelling enough? I also wondered about the decision to see the mayor in the first place. Perhaps I had been optimistic to assume he could be counted on to do the right thing. Maybe he and Henderson and Croft were all totally powerless—and we should have gone directly to the governor. I wondered if the meeting might have gone differently.

  The rest of the day was a blur of emotion, adrenaline, texts, calls, and more meetings. When I wasn’t strategizing with Andy and Kirk, I still had thousands of resident applications to sift—and the rest of my Hurley responsibilities. And I was recounting the latest events to Melany and Elin.

  * * *

  —

  ELIN WAS STILL ON the case, digging into the water treatment and corrosion weeds with Marc Edwards, and what they guessed was happening at MDEQ. In the time since she and I met Marc at lunch, he and his Flint Water Study team had been continuing to work the system just as hard as we were. Marc was emailing every possible agency and government office that dealt with the Flint water or public health. He had written the mayor, the county health department, a number of people at MDEQ, and the governor’s office.

  Marc was already sending in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain state and EPA email records, looking for answers. He had learned from his experience in D.C. to keep pushing the authorities consistently and firmly—and a FOIA request was the perfect way to exert pressure. He informed each agen
cy that a request had been made, which alone might prompt them into proper action. But then, it could have another effect too: fear and more stalling. Rarely did the agencies turn the requests around in the time required by law.

  In the clinic parking lot that evening, before going home, I called Marc to tell him about the meeting with the mayor. I was still angry and pinned the blame on MDEQ and the governor’s office, calling them “Republican bastards” who put dollars above poor kids.

  This was followed by a long silence.

  “I’m a conservative Republican,” Marc said.

  “What?”

  There’s no way to describe the internal chaos that ensued. My mind was spinning and reeling. Marc Edwards is a Republican? Making assumptions and leaning on stereotypes, I had mentally sized him up as a lefty activist, perhaps with a libertarian streak. If I saw myself as committed to public health and protecting kids, Marc was probably even more so. He had devoted his career to crusading against negligence and dishonesty. He believed if you weren’t on the right side of a public health crisis, you were a bystander to a crime. And he wore baby-animal ties.

  I assumed this meant he was…well, I didn’t know, but whatever it was, he couldn’t be a conservative Republican. This news was taking a while to sink in. I knew Republicans and had grown up with Republicans. And I knew that progressives didn’t have a monopoly on integrity or caring about people. At the same time, in the years I’d been working in Flint as a pediatrician, I hadn’t encountered many crusaders who weren’t lefties like me.

  But did it matter?

  On one hand, it did. Republicans had starved the government and made the decisions that resulted in the water switch—and the outcome only confirmed their suspicion that all government was bad. But on the other hand, what mattered wasn’t politics or political philosophy—it was Flint’s kids. That was ground I was willing to stand on with anybody. And it was a good piece of ground to occupy: anyone who wasn’t on it was on the wrong side, regardless of political affiliation.

  For Marc’s part, I wondered if his politics made his iconoclastic activism easier—or, at least, less of an anguished struggle. I was a true believer when it came to government. I had faith in its ability to protect rights, promote equality, and mitigate historic injustice. So much of my life and advocacy rested on that. But what had happened in Flint, and what was happening with the state, was seriously eroding that faith.

  * * *

  —

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, CAME. No word from the city, nothing from the mayor’s office. Every minute felt like an hour. I did my work at Hurley and tried to stay attentive and available at home, but I was a walking zombie.

  I hadn’t eaten a true meal, or anything beyond occasional bites and nibbles, for weeks. I was mainlining caffeine, drinking oceans of coffee. I was wired.

  Once again I found myself in an antiseptic boardroom, this time to give my presentation to Pete Levine’s county medical society group. A dozen doctors sat around the table, along with a few Hurley residents I had brought with me from Community Pediatrics, including Allison. As soon as I began talking, though, one of the group’s members, an older physician, confronted me. Without a sense of what she sounded like, she complained that Flint residents didn’t pay their water bills—and predicted this water thing would just encourage more of that, which would cause the doctor’s own already high water bills to rise even more.

  My mouth agape, I pretended she hadn’t said that—how could she say something like that?—but Dr. Reynolds wasn’t so forgiving. He got on her for her remarks, while Pete Levine masterfully kept things moving with adept political and diplomatic skills. Soon they were all rapt and on board. It didn’t take anything but facts and science to convince a group of doctors. By the time I was finished, the doctors had passed a resolution pledging their support. Relieved and excited, I was starting to feel the wind at my back, encouraging me. The state and city were still stonewalling, but with my data in hand, we were building a movement of doctors.

  Andy Leavitt was eager to release my study in advance of the press conference. As usual, he had a strategy, and he was sure it was the right one. He wanted to put heat on the mayor, the health departments, and the governor. I pushed back: we had told the mayor he had until Wednesday at noon, and we had to stick to that promise. But Andy doubted me, probably figuring I knew next to nothing about political maneuvering.

  “I would like to scream the results from every rooftop,” I texted him. Sometimes you don’t have to maneuver. You just have to be honest, direct, and persistent.

  Assuming the mayor would not respond, Andy then decided to reach out to The Washington Post. He was sure it would become a national story. (The rest of us were not convinced.) The Post had been late to the D.C. crisis but had made up for it with great coverage later on. If there was a major newspaper that would intuitively get the importance of a lead-in-water story, it would be them. There were Post reporters who already knew about corrosive water and lead leaching out of old service pipes. Andy’s plan was to give the Post a heads-up on the Flint story—and embargo my study until immediately after the press conference. This sounded great to me. A national newspaper would be difficult for the state to discredit, and it would hit the governor’s office harder.

  While I waited to hear back from Andy, I got an email from Marc Edwards saying that if the mayor’s office didn’t come along, “it had been decided” that I’d share my results with Ron Fonger at The Flint Journal.

  It had been decided? This caught me off guard. Why was Marc telling me this—and not Andy? And what had happened to the Post—and why was Marc involved and knew about a decision before I did?

  My lack of food and sleep was probably a factor, or the recent discovery that Marc was a Republican, but I was suddenly paranoid and doubting his motives. What if he has a secret agenda? What if he’s just trying to get back at government because of D.C.?

  I called Andy right away. “Can you please confirm that we’re going with Ron Fonger?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Marc contacted a reporter he knows at the Post, who worked on the D.C. crisis. Word came back that the paper is busy this week with the Hillary email story. They said no. Besides, Marc really thinks Ron is great and deserves it.” Fonger had been on the water story from the beginning.

  “And you think that’s the best approach?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay,” I said, exhaling. “Just needed to check.”

  Before bed, Kirk texted us all to report that Mayor Walling had called him at home, wanting to talk. The mayor had been ruminating and was full of justifications. “Everybody knows they’re supposed to flush the water,” he’d said. Kirk objected and pressured him to stand with us. But the mayor felt it was unnecessary.

  * * *

  —

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, ARRIVED, the day of the mayor’s deadline. I took my mom to the hospital for eye surgery. I brought my laptop and phone and had both going in the waiting room while she was in surgery and then in recovery. Her doctor came out and, realizing that I was a doctor too, switched into doctor-speak and shared how everything had gone. The whole thing had lasted just a couple of hours. I worked on my presentation—and was in constant contact with Mark, my brother, who wanted to know first how Bebe was doing, and second, what was going on in Flint. It seemed like a very long time ago that we’d talked things out while doing the jigsaw puzzle, but it had been only a few days.

  My mom was wearing eye patches and was supposed to rest. I took her photo—it was a little grisly—and texted it to my brother, proof that she was out of surgery. Then I got her into her house and into bed. I closed the curtains and dimmed the lights.

  “Mona, tell me what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean, Mama?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Everything is good. I’m helping with a
situation—something the state isn’t doing but should.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s the kind of thing you taught me to do. Something you would do, if you had a chance. My patients, my kids…it’s like they were in an accident, a lot of them were, and it wasn’t their fault.”

  She became quiet. I think she knew I wasn’t going to say anything more than that. She had a knack for leaving me alone and giving me space when I needed it. And I knew she would ask Mark, and he would explain it better than I could.

  I checked my phone. It was noon.

  Nothing.

  The deadline had passed.

  TO MAKE SURE MAYOR WALLING KNEW the deadline had passed, somebody in Senator Ananich’s press office called him to double-check. Sure enough, we were told that there would be no cooperation from the mayor’s office. So we moved ahead without him.

  The Hurley press people met me in my office and began working on an advisory to the media, announcing a press conference at the hospital the next day. There was almost no information in the release, or as little as possible. But behind the scenes, we were working every angle to make sure we had built a coalition of support. Andy was still quarterbacking while Kirk leaned on his contacts in the professional health and medical worlds, preparing them to stand behind me. Jordan Dickerson, our congressman’s aide, was away from Representative Kildee’s office but still in the loop. He planned to issue a statement as soon as the story broke. And Senator Ananich’s press office was working with Ron Fonger at The Flint Journal, teeing him up to break the story. Fonger called, and we made a plan to meet at the Hurley clinic in the morning so I could explain my study to him—and answer any questions.