“I didn’t believe it at first.”
Carl Mizell, SVSU theatre graduate, has lived in the Flint area “on and off” for his entire life. He and his wife Katie have lived in the city for the past five years. But the water crisis crept up on them.
In August and September 2014, Flint citizens were asked to boil their water before using it. It had only been a few months since Gov. Rick Snyder’s
emergency manager switched Flint’s water supply over to the Flint River. Already, Flint’s tap water was infested with E. Coli.
“We were all pretty unhappy with the boil advisory. I remember making a pot of rice and wondering if I had to, like, double boil it,” says Carl, laughing. “But I still did everything with it, still showered in it.”
Carl never suspected the scare would evolve into a massive, long-term health crisis.
“I was like ‘Well, OK, we have to boil our water? Whatever, it happens.”
When folks in the area started reporting that there was something wrong with their water, Carl says that he was “a little dubious about it at first,” even when pictures of brown water started flooding social media.
“In this day and age of ‘pics or it didn’t happen,’ that was kind of helpful,” he says. “But at the same time, I had to wonder if they had put anything in there. … It took a while, but eventually, I caught on.”
Carl said the public and private researchers who worked tirelessly to expose the health crisis ended his skepticism.
“When Virginia Tech came up and … started finding 400 parts per billion, excessively high, that’s when I started to go ‘OK, this has got to change.’”
Researchers measure lead contamination of water in terms of parts per billion. No amount of lead is safe to consume, but the EPA doesn’t require action until 15 parts of lead per billion are recorded. But some homes in Flint were reporting lead rates dozens of times higher.
“A friend of mine lives across the street from LeeAnne (Walters), basically ground zero for all this, who started talking to Marc Edwards from Virginia Tech. If you stood in (her water), everything from there down was itchy and red and blotchy. Her kids had clumps of hair fall out.”
When Walters brought her concerns to officials, they gave her the cold shoulder. As Gov. Snyder’s office put it in April 2015: ”Flint’s water system is producing water that meets all state and federal standards.”
This was a lie. And the Snyder administration knew it.
In January 2015, while Gov. Snyder told Flint that its water was safe, state workers in Flint were being shipped bottled water. That means that for the better part of a year, Snyder’s employees were not drinking Flint water because he knew there was a serious problem. All the while, the governor’s staff was actively discrediting anyone who dared to say otherwise. When researchers like Dr. Marc Edwards announced their dire findings, Snyder’s public relations staff smeared them as liars. While Snyder played politics, people were being poisoned.
Thankfully, Carl never had dramatic symptoms. And while he and Katie have limited their tap water use, they haven’t noticed the extreme discoloration other people from Flint have. At most, he says, “When my wife takes a bath, when you have large amounts, you start to see some (yellow) come in,” he says.
But tap water can still contain dangerous levels of lead without having the famous brown hue and foul odor that has become associated with the crisis. That fact has been weighing on Carl, lately.
“I was drinking a gallon of water a day out of this tap,” Carl says. “What have I been doing to myself? I was saying to Kate last night that I need to go to the doctor. … I’d like to get a full battery of tests done to see if anything has changed because, while I feel and look healthy, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside.”
Today, Flint’s tap water still contains criminal levels of lead. Recent testing has found homes with water in excess of 4,000 parts of lead per
billion.
Despite national attention, children in Flint are still contracting lead poisoning, putting them at risk for neurological disorders that will not show themselves for years. We still don’t know the extent of the problem in Flint.
“For me, that’s the biggest takeaway — not knowing,” he says. “What has this done potentially to me and to my wife and to anyone who has been drinking this and not knowing?”
