The Flint water crisis

On 25 April 2014 Flint stopped buying treated Lake Huron water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and began drawing from the Flint River. A state-appointed emergency manager made the switch to cut costs while a new pipeline was built. The city's own treatment plant had not run full time in almost 50 years, and it added no corrosion control. By then Flint had fewer than 100,000 residents, about 57 percent of them Black, and 41.6 percent lived below the federal poverty line.

Residents soon complained about the color, smell and taste of the water. Bacterial detections brought boil-water advisories in August and September 2014, and in October the General Motors plant in Flint went back to Lake Huron water because the river water was corroding engine parts. In February 2015 the city found lead at 104 micrograms per liter in the home of Lee Ann Walters. By the end of August 2015 Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech, testing with residents, had found that 20 percent of 120 home samples exceeded the federal action level of 15 micrograms per liter.

On 24 September 2015 Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at Hurley Medical Center, announced that blood lead levels in young children had risen since the switch. Her published analysis showed the share of children under 5 with levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter or more going from 2.4 percent in 2013 to 4.9 percent in 2015, with the steepest rise where water lead was highest and no significant change outside the city. The county declared a public health emergency on 1 October, and Flint returned to Detroit water on 16 October. President Barack Obama issued a federal emergency declaration on 16 January 2016.

A CDC analysis of 9,422 blood lead tests in children under 6 put the adjusted probability of an elevated level 46 percent higher in the first months after the switch than before it. Two outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in 2014 and 2015 sickened 79 people and killed 12; a 2018 study found the odds of a Flint resident presenting with the disease rose 6.3-fold after the switch and climbed as free chlorine in the water fell.

The governor's Flint Water Advisory Task Force reported in March 2016 that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality bore primary responsibility, having misapplied the federal Lead and Copper Rule so that lead levels were under-reported. It called the crisis a case of environmental injustice.