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

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

  Governor Snyder didn’t come alone. He was joined by a posse—Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley, who was in Flint a few days a week by then, MDHHS director Nick Lyon, and two indistinguishable top-level aides. Hurley is a diverse place—lots of women, lots of people of color, and a lot of white doctor coats. Now my tiny office was suddenly very crowded with dark suits, worn by five guys who were very tall and very white. Somewhere, down near the floor, were me and my medical student Joe. I felt like Bilbo Baggins when the dwarves keep showing up for the Unexpected Party at the beginning of The Hobbit.

  The governor started off with an apology. By then, he had been doing a lot of that. Three days after President Obama declared a federal emergency in Flint, the governor had apologized to the people of Flint in his annual State of the State address. He had even used the words toxic stress and activated the National Guard to distribute water. A few days later he returned some executive power to Mayor Weaver.

  Apologies are easy, however, and in Flint they were starting to come pretty cheap. The minute I started hearing one, I thought, I don’t care about your apology. I care about action. I cared about getting enough funding, and the interventions, and how things would work out for the kids of Flint for the next few decades. I would have to work with this governor and many governors to come.

  As he apologized, I looked him right in the eye. Governor Snyder had genuine remorse and regret in his voice. He was visibly shaking—I thought he might cry—but he steadied himself and continued. He said he was about to announce the new state budget and wanted to tell me his plans for Flint. The state budget director was on speakerphone. Almost everything I asked for, my entire list of demands—all the wrap-around services for the kids that I had recommended—were, in some shape or form, in the budget.

  Nutrition. Health. Education. That meant enhanced meals at school. That meant medical home access for all families and children. Even more support would come from the federal government when it granted Flint a Medicaid waiver. That would mean more school nurses—ten for the city instead of just one. That would mean nurse-family partnerships, home visiting, universal early intervention, school-based health centers, preschools, and expanded pediatric behavioral health access. More than a hundred million dollars of the Michigan budget would be dedicated to Flint kids.

  This is the stuff progressives dream about but never get. This is what Alice Hamilton fought to build—“wrap-around services”—when she worked at Hull House. It wasn’t long-term money, forever money—a binding budget cannot be forced on future legislatures—but it would begin to help Flint kids now. It was a big deal. I was truly thrilled and surprised. And I thanked Governor Snyder. It was a good start.

  Then he had a favor to ask. He didn’t exactly put it that way, but that’s what it was. He wanted to know if I could attend a press conference the following week when the budget was announced.

  I knew what that meant: more trophy time. My earlier head-shaking episode had given me even more credibility. Now he hoped I would stand next to him in public and absolve him of wrongdoing or negligence. If I appeared to forgive him, maybe everybody else would.

  Fortunately, I had a legitimate excuse to say no. I was going to be tied up in D.C. that day. I was called to testify about the Flint water crisis to a joint committee of Congress. I was very relieved it worked out that way, even if I was thrilled that he had gone along with most of our demands and suggestions.

  Prior to the crisis, Snyder had been popular and had even been considering a presidential run. His fall from grace had been sudden and steep—and completely a result of Flint. His administration had ignored so many red flags. His staff and appointees had ignored the activists’ loud and sustained protests. They had ignored the concerns of health professionals and water treatment experts. They had chosen to look the other way, and when faced with the results of their own apathy and negligence, they had tried to cover up.

  If I had to locate an exact cause of the crisis, above all others, it would be the ideology of extreme austerity and “all government is bad government.” The state of Michigan didn’t need less government; it needed more and better government, responsible and effective government. And people who are not being poisoned by the tap water.

  For decades, the city and state infrastructure had been neglected in order to save money. State environmental and health agencies had been defunded, and great public servants had become disillusioned and retired, leaving these agencies a shadow of what they were supposed to be. All the budget cuts and so-called fiscal “responsibility” had resulted in a winner-take-all culture, a disdain for regulations and career regulators, a rubber-stamping of bad ideas, a gross underfunding of environmental enforcement, limited understanding of and expertise in public health, and a disregard for the poor. Snyder’s people tried to be good at PR, but in the end they even failed at that.

  The implementation of the EM law was the deciding factor—evidence of contempt for Flint and its poor residents, as if they were subcitizens who didn’t deserve a fair say or vote. Years before the water switch, members of the state’s black caucus in Congress had asked the Justice Department to review the constitutionality of the EM law. Though they were ultimately unsuccessful, residents of cities taken over by emergency managers fiercely argued that the EM law violated the Voting Rights Act, since it subjected more than half of Michigan’s African-American voters to emergency management in their schools or cities.

  “Everybody knows that this [water crisis] would not have happened in predominantly white Michigan cities like West Bloomfield, or Grosse Pointe, or Ann Arbor,” Michael Moore wrote in Time. “Everybody knows that if there had been two years of taxpayer complaints, and then a year of warnings from scientists and doctors, this would have been fixed in those towns….

  “This is a racial crime. If it were happening in another country, we’d call it an ethnic cleansing.”

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  —

  ABOUT A MONTH AFTER my press conference, Governor Snyder named five men to a Flint water task force. When I first heard about it, I was skeptical—not just because they couldn’t bother to find a single woman but because naming a blue-ribbon committee is a time-honored way to “solve” a political nuisance. But I was reassured to hear that Dr. Reynolds was on the task force, and that it would be cochaired by former state representative Chris Kolb, an environmentalist and also a student of Bunyan Bryant. Kolb had been prematurely expelled from public service because of Michigan’s stupid term-limit law. I started calling it the Five Guys Committee, and not long afterward the task force informally adopted that name for itself.

  It was charged with “reviewing actions regarding water use and testing in Flint” and asked to “offer recommendations for future guidelines to protect the health and safety of all state residents.”

  The Five Guys took their mission seriously, probably more seriously than the governor intended, and in March 2016 released a kickass 112-page report. It fixed blame for the failure of government primarily on MDEQ, but it didn’t spare the governor, the emergency managers, or the MDHHS. The report stated very clearly that the demographics of a community—race—had played a role in creating this environmental crisis. And it stated that race had kept the crisis going long after it should have been stopped. The Five Guys explicitly connected the Flint water crisis to the emergency manager law. And in this way, the report was historic. Never had a government report explicitly stated the role of race in an environmental crisis. And never before had the consequences of the loss of democracy been so keenly demonstrated. Flint may be the most egregious modern-day example of environmental injustice.

  Later, in February 2017, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights made similar findings in its own investigation. Another father of environmental justice, Robert Bullard, once said some communities have “the wrong complexion for protection.” That is how I see it too.

  Flint falls right i
nto the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Sandra Bland. Freddie Gray (also a victim of lead poisoning). Alton Sterling. Tamir Rice.

  At a January 2016 rally, Jesse Jackson called Flint a crime scene: “I guarantee you if it was any of my homeboys, my friends, they’d be in handcuffs right now.” Think about it. How many African Americans, and others, are in jail for the most minor offenses, simple assaults, minor burglaries, bail violations, drug crimes? One in three African-American men will be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Too many. It’s racially driven mass incarceration. Yet I won’t be surprised if relatively little jail time is served by anyone for the Flint mess, even though it could measurably alter eight to ten thousand kids’ lives.

  I was prepared for years of battle and denials. I never thought the governor or his administration would be capable of comprehending and accepting the charge of willful negligence—or would ever do anything about it. But I was wrong: when faced with data that could not be ignored and the full weight of the crisis—the protesters and the media onslaught—he got his act together. Though his words were stilted, too slow, and never robust enough, his deeds, and the deeds of his administration, deserve some respect.

  I’m wise enough to know that Brad Wurfel and others got their marching orders from higher up, possibly all the way up. I also know that most people, except for megalomaniacs like Saddam Hussein, don’t wake up in the morning saying, “I want to poison thousands of people.”

  Admitting your mistakes, and then doing what you can to rectify them, takes integrity and strength. And in the end, I felt the governor cared—and was truly sorry. This gave me hope, because a man who cares and feels sorry might do more for Flint kids, to rectify his mistakes, than a politician with less at stake. Even if he didn’t care and wasn’t sorry, he knew that the balance of his political career would be judged by his response to this crisis.

  That’s why, rather than seeking retribution or political advantage, I decided to remain loyal to only one group: Flint kids. I will do whatever it takes to help them and to keep on helping them, even if it means working with people whose ideology and actions got us into this mess.

  At the end of my meeting with the governor, he asked for my blessing, and I gave it to him. Four months later, in June 2016, after a lot of dogged advocacy, the Michigan state legislature, following the lead of senate minority leader Jim Ananich, passed the budget. The three state budget supplements, passed at three different times, totaled about $200 million in aid for Flint.

  It would take another six months of coalition building, roller-coaster ups and downs, and trips to D.C.—more than a year after the crisis was exposed—before a Flint aid package finally passed in the U.S. Congress, with much thanks to the stubborn efforts of Congressman Dan Kildee and Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, as well as Congressman Fred Upton, a Republican from western Michigan.

  The advocacy life is like that. One day, a victory. The next day, a crushing disappointment.

  And the next, another victory.

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN’T MEET MIGUEL DEL TORAL until he came to town in March 2016. We had emailed and talked on the phone, but we had never met until just after President Obama declared the federal emergency, paving the way for more EPA resources and intervention. So our meeting came at a happy moment, in the glow of one of those victories.

  We were all supposed to have dinner—Marc Edwards, LeeAnne Walters, Miguel, and me. But Miguel was stuck in his hotel room with severe back pain. We all had gone through dark nights of the soul as advocates for Flint. But the efforts to silence and ruin Miguel for his whistle-blowing—and his being dismissed, having to leak his own memo, and being sent to the EPA ethics office—had taken a toll on him physically. He could barely stand, let alone walk. So we all went up to his hotel room, just to say hello. I really wanted to meet him, to thank him, to hug him.

  When we were introduced, Miguel leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, the endearing way you’d greet a child. I still remember the way that felt and how sweet it was.

  LEFT TO RIGHT: LEEANNE, MIGUEL, ME, AND MARC

  You can’t tell from the photograph, but we are all holding him up—and helping him stand. When we helped him sit again, I noticed that his feet were bare and his toenails were painted. Throughout the crisis, his wife had complained that Miguel was so consumed by the Flint water, so infatuated with lead pipes, that he had stopped listening to her and couldn’t remember anything she said. So one night, while he was on the phone talking about the water, she painted his toenails to get him to pay attention to her—and it worked. The polish was flaking off but still there.

  * * *

  —

  A MONTH LATER ELIN and I had lunch, meeting at our favorite diner. It was April, and a lot was still happening in Flint. The final Five Guys report had come out the month before, spelling out in harsh terms the negligence and willful disregard for health, particularly by MDEQ. Brad Wurfel had lost his job in December, right after Christmas, the same day his boss, Dan Wyant, resigned.

  In the past six months, more than fifty lawsuits had been filed, and the first criminal charges were announced—against two state officials, Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby in the drinking water division of MDEQ. There were six charges altogether, including misleading the EPA, manipulating water sampling, and tampering with reports. MDEQ received the most indictments and charges. Besides Busch and Prysby, the top drinking-water regulator, Liane Shekter-Smith, was fired.

  Three members of the MDHHS epidemiology and lead staff—Corinne Miller, Bob Scott, and Nancy Peeler—were charged with actively covering up the spike in blood-lead-level data. I never learned why nurse Karen Lishinski failed to follow up with me. She was never accused of wrongdoing, but her superiors at the state lead surveillance program were.

  Down the road, MDHHS director Nick Lyon and Eden Wells were charged, related to the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak. Wells was charged with obstruction of justice, Lyon with misconduct. Both were charged with involuntary manslaughter, along with three others—Busch, Howard Croft, and Shekter-Smith—for their failure to act in the crisis.

  The criminal complaint against Lyon included a reference to his email to subordinates, asking them to make “a strong statement with a demonstration of proof that the blood-lead levels seen are not out of the ordinary.”

  Susan Hedman, the director of EPA Region 5, where Miguel worked, resigned in January 2016. A scathing report by the agency’s inspector general said that the EPA should have acted seven months sooner. This prompted Representative Kildee to lead a charge to pass a bipartisan bill that requires the EPA to notify the public any time lead is found in the water supply.

  Flint officials weren’t spared. City manager Natasha Henderson was fired in February; Howard Croft lost his job and was charged with two additional felonies—false pretenses and conspiracy to commit false pretenses in connection with the water crisis. Another Flint city official, Mike Glasgow, was accused of tampering with a lead report. Later, Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley was charged with involuntary manslaughter.

  Dayne Walling, who lost his bid for reelection just six weeks after my press conference, was the first political casualty of the crisis. I have often suspected that if he’d been on the right side of the fight—and had skipped his chance to meet the pope—things would have been different. Today, he regularly expresses regret about his role.

  Governor Snyder survived his own crash in the polls and was not forced to resign. But his reputation is tarnished, and he appea
rs to have abandoned thoughts of seeking higher office.

  Many people asked me, “Shouldn’t the governor go to jail?” Truth and reconciliation and restorative justice are part of healing. And investigations are important. But the law is not my job. My focus is on the health and well-being of Flint kids.

  Accountability is another matter. In D.C., it is what Marc Edwards hoped for but never received. The D.C. water crisis took a decade to be resolved, and unsatisfactorily: negligent and deceitful government employees and water utility executives never paid a price, were never charged with a crime, never even lost their jobs. Most of the children in D.C. who were affected—potentially 42,000 of them—were never compensated or even made aware of what had happened. When Marc came to Flint, he despaired that his work wouldn’t make a difference, even though he was committed to doing all he could. It was this sense of resignation, and even bitterness, that I saw in his eyes and face the first time we met in September. And when he looked across the table and said, “I trust you,” the leap he was taking was obvious. This was a man who had been undermined, lied to, and dismissed by public health “experts” for years, but who never gave up on his mission.

  After our initial meeting at the farmers’ market, hundreds of emails passed between Marc and me, both curses and celebrations. He became a fixture in my life, like a long-lost brother. But it would be another two months before we met again face-to-face. We were both in D.C. for a meeting of the EPA drinking water committee at which the existing Lead and Copper Rule was up for discussion. It was our chance to advocate for strengthening the rule. We wanted the EPA to finally force utilities to methodologically optimize corrosion control and replace the lead pipes.

  On our way to the hearing, Marc was stopped by a woman who recognized him. She had graying hair and looked worn and tired. She said she was an activist in D.C. and had a son who was a baby during the lead exposure. A teenager now, the boy’s learning and behavioral problems were significant. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wonder if it was the D.C. water that impacted my son,” she said, then thanked Marc for his work.