Residents of Flint, Mich., still reeling after the city’s tainted-water crisis, are now tackling coronavirus worries. Some are still drinking bottled water.
Residents of Flint, Mich., still reeling after the city’s tainted-water crisis, are now tackling coronavirus worries. Some are still drinking bottled water.
‘Double Challenge Mode’ in Flint, Where Virus Follows Water Crisis
By Julie Bosman and Brittany GreesonPhotographs by Brittany GreesonAugust 18, 2020
Flint, Mich., had not yet recovered from the water catastrophe that began six years ago. Then came the coronavirus.
It was a fresh trauma layered on top of those from the past. Flint residents had already seen auto plants close, unemployment skyrocket and gun violence and blight scar their streets.
But they have been failed most painfully by their elected officials, who introduced tainted water into their homes in 2014. The city failed to add necessary corrosion controls to water from the Flint River and lead seeped into the drinking supply.
A project to replace lead service lines throughout the city was supposed to end last year. It was delayed again during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and restarted in June.
We’ve gotten to know Flint and its people through the water crisis. But we’ve never heard so much frustration and despair in their voices as this summer.
Claudia Perkins-Milton, a retired United Auto Workers negotiator, had a wrenching story to tell: For two weeks this spring, she was confined to her bed, feverish and listless, eating only oranges for sustenance.
On Mother’s Day, Ms. Perkins-Milton’s daughter flew to Flint and took her to a hospital, where she tested positive for Covid-19.
“First the water crisis, and now here comes Covid,” she said. “We’re in double challenge mode.”
Ms. Perkins-Milton, 67, is recovered — “I got the whip cracking again!” — and newly devoted to activism. She is a plaintiff in a large lawsuit against the state. At community meetings, she is often up front, wearing a black-and-white T-shirt that says “Flint is still broken.”
In some ways, Flint looks like it did in the early days of the water crisis. Churches distribute free cases of bottled water, with lines of residents stretching for blocks.
As she has since 2014, Ms. Perkins-Milton uses bottled water for drinking, bathing and to rinse vegetables that she cooks for dinner.
“We don’t trust the administration, we don’t trust the water, we don’t trust the state, we don’t trust the E.P.A., because they lied to us how many times?” Ms. Perkins-Milton said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. “The water crisis is far from over.”
Leon Abdullah EL-Alamin, 39, lives with his 7-year-old son in Flint and runs a community organization that works with formerly incarcerated people. He has seen how the virus deepened Flint’s problems.
“What Covid really did was isolate people even more, people who are dealing with issues from the water crisis to poverty to post-traumatic stress,” he said.
Mr. EL-Alamin has taught Flint residents landscaping skills, a hopeful step into the job market. Since the coronavirus, opportunities for work have become even more scarce.
“For most people, we were just existing before Covid,” he said. “We’ve been in survival mode for generations now.”
Violent crime has spiked in Flint during the pandemic. Mr. EL-Alamin worries that the children drinking lead-tainted water six years ago are now teenagers suffering from its many possible effects, including impulsive behavior. “We see a lot of anger in the younger ones,” he said.
“A lot of folks are spiritually dead,” he said. “A lot of folks feel hopeless. The ongoing water crisis hasn’t been resolved and justice has not been served.”
Jeree Brown and her husband, Jabari, had to travel from Flint to Texas last month. When their son, Jabari Jr., saw a cousin pour a glass of water from the tap, he began shouting. “My son was like, ‘Oh my God, you can’t drink the water, the water is bad,’” she recalled. "It’s kind of to the point where I feel like my family is traumatized. We’re so screwed up in the head.”
It is those moments that makes Ms. Brown, 32, wonder when her family will recover from the water crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, which forced her usually outdoorsy children into a cramped indoor confinement.
She has pushed through by finishing her nursing degree, a longstanding goal. But her children’s schooling will happen at home this fall, and she worries about other Flint children. “Not every parent is like me who’s going to sit and make sure they understand what they’re doing and teach them,” she said.
Ms. Brown has a plan to get out.
For months, she has been scouring real estate listings outside the city. The house she owns in Flint is still scarred in her view: Much of the city’s project to bring new water lines is now complete, but her house has yet to have them replaced.
How could it be taking so long, she asks herself. “They knew something was wrong and they didn’t do anything,” she said. “And people were getting sick just like they were from Covid. I think of the water crisis as a pandemic in itself.”
Julie Bosman is a correspondent based in Chicago.
Brittany Greeson is a freelance photographer based in Detroit.
Produced by Crista Chapman and Monica Davey