For many city residents the bottles are as empty as the promises of government officials who told them their water was safe to drink.
The river water was 19 times more acidic than the water from Detroit.
The lead problem, which local and state officials denied then downplayed for more than a year while Flint’s residents drank, bathed and cooked with the water, is also blamed for more than 300 miscarriages.
“My children’s lives have been changed forever because the government believed we have no right to clean water,” Ms. Wakes said.
A retest of her water a month later found lead at 397 parts per billion.
She said the state continued to erode public trust in April by declaring the water crisis over and ending free bottled water distribution, even as water service line replacement continued and residents were required to pay to let water run from their taps so anti-corrosion chemicals can recoat the inside of service lines.
“This crisis never should have started or gone on as long as it has,” said Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician in Flint and author of a book about the water crisis, “What the Eyes Don’t See; A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City.” “Uncovering the problem took a series of dominoes — first the moms, then journalists, and pastors and the scientists.” She leaves government officials out of that lineup, saying there’s been an “abandonment of our civic responsibility,” and residents of poor, minority neighborhoods have been disproportionately hurt.
And like Pittsburgh’s mills, Flint’s auto plants started withering in the last quarter of the 20th century.
In some neighborhoods, a lead service line replacement costs more than the value of the house it’s linking to the water system.
Tia Ivory, whose home in Flint had lead water levels above 775 parts per billion — more than 50 times the federal action level — before her water pipes were dug up and replaced, said the water crisis was a case of piling on to preexisting poverty-caused stresses and traumas.