Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for a tour of the Flint, Michigan, wastewater treatment plant on September 14, 2016. A protester holds a bottle of water taken from Flint's contaminated municipal water supply during a protest outside the city's water treatment plant on October 2, 2015 in Detroit, Michigan.
The water Flint bought in Detroit contained high levels of lead and copper, chemicals used in the United States to control lead and copper levels in drinking water. Del Toral warned, however, that there was no chemical barrier that would prevent lead or copper from entering Flint residents' drinking water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Protection said.
Flint also never tested for lead and copper levels in the Detroit system's drinking water, he said. Flint tapped Detroit's municipal water system in 2013 to get water from Lake Huron and the Detroit River. In 2014, Flint switched its water supply to Michigan's Department of Environmental Protection, instead of Detroit's system, which originated in Lake Huron, and instead used the river's water, state authorities said.
The Flint River development was supposed to be an intermediate source until the city could join a new system that draws water from Lake Huron. In the meantime, Flint had the opportunity to continue to buy treated water from DWSD, whose source is Lake Huron, and treat it in its own facility. However, after failing to agree on a short-term contract with DW SD, Flint decided to use the water in Flint's River instead of treating it with FWSC.
The four of us cycled through the scrubbed AAU hoops game and then - Mayor Dayne Walling pressed a black button on the countdown. Flint's River was chosen because an angry Detroit water utility was unwilling to renegotiate its contract with the city of Flint. After several months of negotiations with a Detroit-based system, Flint's water supply was switched to Flint River in April 2014.
To save money, Flint began to draw water from the Flint River for its 100,000 residents. Snyder announced that the state would spend $1 million to buy water filters and test water for Flint's public schools, and days later urged Flint to reuse water from the Detroit system. In the spring, Flint turned to a company it had been banking on for nearly 50 years on the orders of state officials. The company had struck a deal with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to buy water from Lake Huron instead of using water from the Flint River.
Since switching to the Flint River as a water source, the probability of LD incidence has been estimated at 0.5% to 1%. Phase B was the city of Flint's failure to treat its water, and Flint switched from the water of the Flint River to the water of Lake Huron for its public schools. No cases of LD have been observed in the city's public school system or any other Michigan public water system.
Since the city switched from its urban water source to the Flint River, the number of LD cases in Flint and other locations in Genesee County that are not Flint has increased, as has the likelihood of an LD outbreak in neighboring communities caused by exposure to Flint water. Incidents and risks have also occurred in other Flint-area public water systems, such as Flint's public school system. The likelihood of an LD incident in a neighboring community with the same water system has also increased in recent months, suggesting that exposure to Flint water has led to LD outbreaks in neighboring communities.
Ninety cases and 12 deaths have been confirmed, but the source of the outbreaks is not definitively determined or directly linked to Flint's water system. As Anderson (2016) noted, the illnesses in Flint began in the early 1990s, before Flint changed its water supply. The number of cases of acute respiratory disease (ARI) In Genesee County, the number of residents rose from six in 13 years to 87 in 2014, about a year after Flint began using water from the Flint River.
In 2014, Flint switched from Detroit's water system to the Flint River for cost reasons - and cut costs, but leaders insisted the water was not safe to drink or cook. Detroit has offered to reconnect Flint to its water systems, and Virginia Tech has recommended that the state declare Flint's water safe, concluding that it is.
The water supply in the city of Flint, Michigan, has been bedridden for six years, initially with high lead levels and now contaminated with toxic levels. The 42-year-old mother of four has become so used to avoiding tap water that she doesn't even notice it's contaminated. In the 1980s, her mother and two sisters moved to the city, which bore the name, but the EPA had not yet determined dangerous lead levels.