A pseudo-left attack on science in Flint, Michigan -- Part oneScience and public trustfacebook icon
The attack on science has become especially malignant as the Trump administration proceeds rapidly with its decimation of all public agencies. The Department of Education is in the process of being dismantled, already undergoing massive funding cuts, with the aim of eliminating public schools altogether. Notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Director began his term with the immediate firings of thousands of federal epidemiology experts, along with other irreplaceable health professionals.
Other agencies are threatened, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established in 1970 to oversee drinking water management and threats to the environment. Trump has already announced his intention to slash its budget by 65 percent. Hundred have been fired and more attacks on the EPA are immediately posed.
For the people of Flint, Michigan, eleven years after the onset of the water crisis which poisoned thousands of children and adults with lead and other contaminants, Trump's war on science and public health reopens a wound that has barely begun to close.
The Flint water crisis: A crime of capitalism
There is no innocent explanation for the poisoning of Flint's water system. It was a product of the drive by powerful financial interests and their political mouthpieces in both the Democratic and Republican parties to exploit the collapse of the economic base of de-industrialized cities like Flint. Once the largest single center of auto production, Flint was the site of the 1937 sit-down strikes which challenged the iron-fisted rule of General Motors over its workforce and established the right to organize into unions.
At its peak in the 1960s, Flint's population was close to 200,000, with many GM plants and subordinate industrial facilities. As late as the mid-1980s, the massive Buick City production facility alone employed 28,000 workers. But as part of the wave of de-industrialization in the US, the complex closed its doors in 1998, devastating the city's population and leaving Flint as one of the nation's poorest municipalities.
Flint's decline was further undermined by the Wall Street crash of 2008. The capitalist class turned to the systematic plunder of public assets in order to claw back whatever remained of the past social gains of workers.
In 2011, Republican Governor Rick Snyder and the Republican-controlled Michigan state legislature passed a bill to greatly increase the powers of state-appointed emergency financial managers. These officials could override the authority of elected municipal governments and establish a dictatorship of the banks.
While many of these local governments were run by Democrats, there were also Democrats in high places in the financial oversight structure. Most prominent was the state treasurer, Democrat Andy Dillon, the former speaker of the Michigan state assembly and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Dillon was appointed by Snyder and was part of a bipartisan team to enforce the bankruptcy of Detroit, which preceded the Flint water crisis. The Detroit bankruptcy takeover ravaged the city's "crown jewel," its water system, which supplies most of southeastern Michigan. Flint has been its largest single customer (outside of Detroit itself) for half a century.
Using the rapidly rising water rates charged by the Detroit system as a pretext, a pipeline boondoggle was hatched by the state government and some local Flint-area officials to disconnect the city from its 50-year-long source of water, a Detroit-owned pipeline to Lake Huron. In its place, a parallel pipeline was to be built to Lake Huron, owned by a consortium of local and private interests. Difficulties in engineering this project meant that it was not completed by the time Flint was disconnected. As a stopgap, officials decided to use corrosive water from the polluted Flint River, pumped through the city's archaic water treatment plant.
The taste and color of the water changed drastically for the worse. Officials responded to complaints from residents with lies that the water was properly treated and safe to drink. In reality, the corrosive water was eating away at the protective layer on the inside of the many lead pipes in the aging infrastructure and leaching lead into the city's drinking water.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) lied to the EPA that corrosion control treatment was being applied as required under the federal Lead and Copper Rule. As such lies began to be uncovered, high-level EPA officials helped in silencing the agency's own field experts.
During the 18 months when Flint was on untreated river water, its infrastructure was progressively eaten away from the inside. So were the bodies of its people. During that time, Flint's population, some 100,000 people, including 9,000 children, were being poisoned.
The development of public water systems was based on the work of scientists over the last three centuries. Enlightenment thought challenged the dominant authoritarian and religion-based ideologies with rationality, standing on the shoulders of intellectual conquests from the study of the natural world.
Educated men and women, basing themselves on the sciences of physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics and medicine, worked to understand the spread of plague, cholera and typhus, which ravaged populated areas. Modern drinking water and sewerage systems are based upon the painstaking application of this vast historically acquired body of science.
A tale of two "sciences"
There were two different political responses to the criminal actions of the government agencies responsible for overseeing safe drinking water. The first was the response of principled independent water experts to expose the truth of the state of Flint's water and rectify it. The World Socialist Web Site reported on their work, exposed the role of the Snyder administration and the Democratic Party, and fought to mobilize the working class in Flint to defend themselves and their children.
Two recent books, however, have been produced by figures presenting themselves as left-wing while promoting reactionary falsifications about the water crisis:
We the Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans by Jordan Chariton, Rowman & Littlefield, 2024Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan's Water War by Michael Mascarenhas was published in 2024.
In We the Poisoned, the authors falsely claim that there has been no progress made in the water crisis despite the efforts of scientists and workers. In Toxic Water, Toxic System, Mascarenhas portrays the crisis entirely in terms of race, maintaining that structural racism is the cause of the Flint water crisis, which he argues rises to the level of genocide. In advancing this narrative, Mascarenhas distorts the basic reality that the Flint working class is multi-racial, as are those who were affected by the crisis and those who fought to expose it.
These books build on the efforts of self-described "water activists" who have preyed upon the anger of the population, spread demoralization and confusion, and, as is invariably the case with such forces, provided a cover-up of the role the Democratic Party in the Flint crisis, while diverting attention from the fundamental nature of the capitalist system. They use lies and half-truths to deprecate genuine science and further academic or journalistic careers at the expense of the truth.
The two recent books maintain, in one way or another, that Flint's water crisis is permanent. They obscure the real underlying economic, social, and, most importantly, class issues behind the poisoning of Flint.
They follow the method first developed by Benjamin J. Pauli, whose book Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis, was published in 2019. Pauli describes himself as a "militant ethnographer" and is a member of Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership (FACHEP)
The working class in the Flint crisis
The impetus for a struggle against the mass poisoning in Flint came from below, from working-class residents of the city. They protested the decision to draw the city's water from the Flint River from the beginning. When tap water became discolored and smelly, the complaints and protests grew. Shortly after the switch on April 25, 2014:
Within four months (August-September 2014) the city issued two boil water advisories.In October 2014, GM announced it would stop using Flint water due to corrosion of parts.In January 2015, the City of Flint announced it was in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act due to high levels of trihalomethane (a disinfectant byproduct).
Early in 2014, LeeAnne Walters, a Flint mother whose home showed very high levels of lead in water and whose children exhibited symptoms of lead poisoning, contacted EPA water expert Miguel Del Toral. He confirmed that her home had high lead in the tap water and also found that the city was not using corrosion control.
Del Toral gave Walters the phone number of Dr. Marc Edwards, professor in the Environmental and Water Resources Engineering program at Virginia Tech University (VT). Edwards had established a reputation as a passionate fighter against lead-in-water contamination from his work during the Washington DC 2004-2010 water crisis.
When he learned that the Walters family's lead contamination was due to the unlawful lack of proper water treatment, Edwards led the team that performed an independent large-scale sampling of Flint residents' water. The results of the sampling were announced in September 2015. In Edwards' words they revealed a "VERY SERIOUS LEAD IN WATER PROBLEM," and he warned residents to stop drinking the water.[1]
MDEQ officials continued to respond with the lie that the water was safe.
Shortly afterward, a courageous pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, at the urging of her long-time friend, Elin Betanzo, a water expert, followed up with a study showing increased blood-lead levels in Flint children during the period since the switch to Flint River water. Betanzo had herself worked with Edwards during the lead in water crisis in Washington DC.
It was the proof publicly provided by Hanna-Attisha that tipped the scales in favor of truth. Initially, Governor Rick Snyder called the data proving harm to children "sliced and diced," but independent media investigators corroborated it. Snyder was forced to belatedly return Flint to its original treated water source on October 8, 2015.[2]
The recovery effort
In the months after Flint returned to Detroit-treated water, the orthophosphate layer inside the pipes designed to prevent corrosion began to be restored, diminishing the leaching of lead from the pipes into the water. Edwards' VT team and Miguel del Toral worked with LeeAnne Walters to monitor the progress of the water and oversee the government agencies charged with water management to attempt to re-establish trust.[3]
This endeavor was a crucial necessity. Never before had there been a case similar to that of Flint, where a trustworthy water source was replaced with one that lacked the critical treatment needed to keep pipes from corroding -- for any length of time, much less 18 months. So, to determine the time it would take for the city's water to recover involved many complex factors and required a continuous process of scientifically sampling the water.
Adding to the complexity of the effort was the human element: when residents don't trust the safety of the water in their homes, they don't use it. If a significant portion of customers do that, the system and the water in it stagnate, creating conditions for the growth of pathogens.
Flint has a water infrastructure that was designed decades ago to accommodate a growing population of up to 250,000. Due to the decimation of jobs and plant closures by GM and associated industries, by 2014 its population was fewer than 100,000. This means that the determination of water age -- that is, how long water spends in the distribution system before it is used -- becomes a critical factor in management of the water system.
Concurrently, the public exposure of the deception by water officials created a political crisis in Michigan's state government.[4] As Flint's water disaster was reported in the global press, the MDEQ lost all public credibility.
Due to the public outcry, a state of emergency was finally declared in January 2016. Days later, Snyder and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) revealed that during the period when the city was using the water from the Flint River, an outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease infected 87 residents, killing 13.[5] Not only were people being poisoned by lead in the water, but many were dying due to a notoriously infectious disease.
The Snyder administration went into damage control, announcing disingenuous measures to monitor water quality going forward, but the credibility of the state government was destroyed. The funding of a new group of water scientists to investigate the Legionnaires' outbreak was part of Snyder's efforts to present a new face to the public.
Shawn McElmurry and FACHEP
In late 2015, as the water crisis in Flint became publicly known, Professor Shawn McElmurry of Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit began contacting key scientific figures to offer his services, including Edwards.
He claimed he had spent years, since 2010, working on Flint's water distribution system and had a "complete hydraulic model" -- a computer program, based on EPANET software, which maps the municipal distribution system and aids in the location of trouble areas where water stagnates in the pipes and is more susceptible to the growth of pathogens.[6] Such a model would have been invaluable in Flint's recovery. In his blog, Edwards said, "Creating a complete hydraulic model for a city like Flint requires months to years of effort, detailed local knowledge, and true expertise in software and hydraulics."[7]
Edwards himself had been deceived by McElmurry. The supposed expertise of the WSU professor is why Edwards recommended him to colleagues in Flint who then were instrumental in bringing him to the attention of Snyder. It was only later that it was discovered that he did not have either a hydraulic model or the years of experience in Flint he claimed.
The grounds for McElmurry's claim to a hydraulic model was later described by Edwards as a case of identity theft.[8] Kasey Faust was a doctoral engineering student from Purdue University who, as part of her PhD dissertation worked on a paper from 2011 to 2015, called "Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Management in Shrinking Cities."[9]
In 2012, McElmurry met Faust and her advisor at an EPA workshop and was invited to be an external member of her PhD advisory committee, resulting in his name being added to her paper. In October 2015, after the studies of both the VT team and Dr. Hanna-Attisha received wide publicity in the media, McElmurry filed a proposal with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which used Faust's model but claimed it as his own.
It was on this basis that in early 2016 McElmurry was granted a $3.35 million "sole source" (no competing proposals) research contract by Snyder and set up an organization called Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership (FACHEP). His hand-picked members included only those whom he deemed he could depend upon to share his outlook and methods. For that reason, he purposely excluded proven experts such as Edwards, those who worked with him in the Flint study, and many other qualified water and waterborne disease scientists in the region.
FACHEP became a feather in the cap for WSU. It adopted the motto "Wayne State Cares for Flint." Its self-serving promotion, however, pandered to a layer of Flint "activists" at the expense of the residents as a whole.
McElmurry's qualifications have since been challenged, chiefly by Marc Edwards, who had endorsed him in late 2015. WSU has been consistently uncooperative with FOIA requests and has publicly categorized the questioning of McElmurry's credentials as "unacceptable, inappropriate and vitriolic personal attacks on an individual faculty member." Yet the state licensing board, LARA, in official proceedings, said "under oath and in response to the LARA Complaint, McElmurry has been unable to substantiate prior City of Flint experience [...] these overstatements regarding City of Flint experience are deemed to be 'misrepresentations.'"[10]
From the moment of their dishonest birth, the actions of FACHEP weren't aimed at aiding the recovery process already underway, but at furthering a different agenda.
FACHEP's Benjamin Pauli and Flint Fights Back
McElmurry and his colleagues in FACHEP embarked on a public campaign to prove that the NSF-certified point-of-use (POU) filters recommended by the Virginia Tech team, the EPA, and widely accepted by water scientists nationwide, were not safe because they supposedly allowed the growth of bacteria in the filters themselves. This crusade was FACHEP's central focus, despite well-known scientific research findings that the levels of bacteria found in the filters are not a health risk.
One of the FACHEP members selected by McElmurry was Dr. Benjamin Pauli, Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at Kettering University. Pauli has no background in engineering or water science, but as a self-described "militant ethnographer" penned Flint Fights Back, which lays down the "critical theory" justification of the deleterious actions of FACHEP:
The battle over filters was, like so many of the crisis's other subplots, in part a battle over knowledge. Should the filters provided by the state just be accepted graciously and operated unthinkingly or did residents have the right to problematize them, to make them objects of inquiry, to expect that concerns about their functioning would be properly investigated?[11]
What made this "problematization" harmful is not that the filters were investigated, but rather that the EPA-recommended filters were derided publicly by a body claiming to be scientists without any corroboration from qualified experts. Beginning in 2016, FACHEP issued numerous press releases and held public forums in Flint on the danger of legionella bacteria, particularly in homes using POU filters. Included in this release to the general public was the statement:
Point of use filters increase bacterial counts in most homes, and change which bacteria are most abundant. We see increases in some bacteria across filters in homes and we are evaluating whether the types and levels of these bacteria are cause for concern.[12]
In the victimized community of Flint, sowing of distrust in the filters amounted to a self-interested scare tactic by FACHEP. In Flint Fights Back, Pauli retroactively defends this odiously unethical practice with phraseology about "equity" and "inclusivity," writing:
Who was entitled to speak with authority about the filters, to appeal to scientific evidence either to encourage or discourage popular trust in them? [13] [Emphasis added.]
Essentially FACHEP was saying to the community, "You're right to not trust the water from the filters, but you can trust us to share our unproven doubts with you." The method behind FACHEP's actions are an expression of postmodern irrationalist conceptions that had become rampant through academia. Pauli further elaborates this outlook in Flint Fights Back:
...counternarratives are narratives, too. Although fighting to get them accepted may involve bringing suppressed "truths" out into the open, it is not the same thing as impartially pursuing the "whole" truth. Narratives are, by necessity -- by definition, in fact -- selective...[14]
On the matter of objective truth, he elaborates:
Naturally, if our objective is to construct an accurate account of what happened in Flint, weighing the relative veracity of different narratives of the crisis matters. When one approaches narratives from the vantage point of social and political struggle, however, asking how true they are is often less meaningful than asking how useful they are to specific actors. And the utility of a particular narrative is sometimes inversely related to its accuracy and objectivity. This is clear enough when we consider official narratives spun to deflect responsibility and manage popular perceptions. But counterhegemonic narratives, too, incorporate strategic elisions and calculated points of emphasis. We would be foolish to expect those engaged in a struggle for their lives and livelihoods to make impartiality an absolute value.
This does not mean we should expect to find activists embracing outright deceit. What is more common is the idea that "we" who struggle have "our" truth -- a truth rooted in our experiences, a truth that may serve as an antidote to the falsehoods perpetrated by others, but a truth with a small "t," tacitly tailored to our needs and objectives.[15] [Emphasis added.]
It is remarkable that Pauli, as a member of a so-called scientific body, counterposes objective truth to "a truth with a small 't.'" He presents the record of lies by the MDEQ not as lies, but as "official narratives" which justify a "counterhegemonic narrative." Flint Fights Back devotes many pages to categorizing different types of narratives: the official narrative, the historical narrative, the technical narrative, the political narrative, etc. His essential premise is that objective reality doesn't really exist because it is subordinate to the subject -- the "narrator."
All science is based on the premise that objective truth exists independently and outside of consciousness. It is precisely the task of scientists to uncover and ever more closely approximate this objective truth.
Citizen science
The initial sampling led by the VT team was what Edwards described as "citizen science" at its best, in which hundreds of ordinary citizens were instructed in proper sampling methods by a team of engineering students who traveled 500 miles from their home campus and spent many hours to assist the residents in establishing definitive proof that their water was being poisoned.
The significance of this extensive sampling and the donation of time and efforts by VT students to get proper scientific testing cannot be overstated. The high degree of participation by the residents themselves in the sampling is proof of the support by residents of the efforts of scientists.
This effort of the residents themselves under the guidance of scientists, which subsequently forced the return to Flint's original water source, was undeniable proof of the success of this concept of "citizen science."
A paper called "Citizen Science During the Flint, Michigan Federal Water Emergency: Ethical Dilemmas and Lessons Learned" was published by Edwards and his colleague Siddarthe Roy in 2019. An excerpt describing the scientific conflict that emerged follows:
But after the Federal Emergency was declared, ethical dilemmas associated with abuse of citizen science were encountered, conclusions of which were used to support unscientific public health messages that were in direct conflict with those of the relief agencies. A general state of science anarchy resulted which created further distrust and confusion, highlighting the lack of frameworks to police instances of unethical behavior by those claiming to be citizen scientists.[16] [Emphasis added.]
Critical theory opposition to objective science
The hallmark of pseudo-left ideology is "critical theory." Emerging in the 1930s, it is associated with the Frankfurt School, based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. In his 2008 essay "The Frankfurt School vs. Marxism," David North describes critical theory and related ideological tendencies:
...known collectively as "Western" or "Humanist" Marxism. Associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, the influence of the Frankfurt School reached its apogee during the heyday of radical student protests in the late 1960s. After that wave of middle-class radicalism receded, the influence of the Frankfurt School was consolidated in universities and colleges, where so many ex-radicals found tenured positions. From within the walls of the academy, the partisans of the Frankfurt School conducted unrelenting war -- not against capitalism, but, rather, against Marxism. In this struggle, they were remarkably successful. With rare exceptions, very little resembling Marxism -- even if one means by that term only the rigorous application of philosophical materialism to the study of history, society and social consciousness -- has been taught for several decades in the humanities departments of colleges and universities.[17]
In recent years, the Democratic Party has adopted many of the children of critical theory: identity politics, critical race theory, the MeToo movement, and the 1619 Project to name a few. The Flint water crisis unfolded simultaneously with the metastasis of critical theory into all areas of academia, including what is known as the "hard" science studies, or STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).
Science as "politics by other means"
A political theory which is influential among layers of the pseudo-left is called SIPBOM (science is politics by other means). This is the brainchild of French sociologist Bruno Latour. Adapting the well-known adage of 18th century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, "war is politics by other means," Latour maintained that since scientific facts are constructed by communities of scientists, there can be no differentiation between the social and technical aspects of science.[18]
A recent "intersectionalist" campaign called "disrupting engineering" is being promoted in academic circles by the likes of Dr. Donna Riley, currently of the University of New Mexico, who seeks to undermine scientific rigor in engineering and elsewhere. An abstract to her 2017 paper includes this passage:
"Rigorous engineering education research" and the related "evidence-based" research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and "improved" practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.[19] [Emphasis added.]
The conception of "citizen science" became a major source of dispute in Flint, with opportunist layers exploiting ambiguities in the term to advance pseudoscience. In a 2016 paper, Riley wrote about
... a new concept, "citizen engineering," borrowed from a tradition of citizen science in which community members ("non-experts") identify scientific questions and proceed through a formal process, such as participatory action research, to systematically seek answers to their questions by defining and driving their own processes of inquiry and analysis, sometimes but not always with the cooperation of trained scientists.
She added:
... engineering ought to be democratized, that non-engineers can make crucial contributions that improve engineering practice and hold engineering accountable for its roles in society.[20]
In this framework, "democratizing engineering," in a manner totally divorced from trained experts in the field, amounts to postmodern doublespeak aimed at tailoring the results of objective scientific study to conform to the needs of the "public interest," without acknowledging the class forces within capitalism which determine what that "public interest" is. Once that intellectual threshold is crossed, the body of knowledge contained within any field of science, which is embodied in the techniques and the trained experts of that field, becomes secondary at best to the determination of what is in the "public interest."
That paradigm fit the opportunist practice of McElmurry's team to a tee. When the results of scientific sampling showed that water in Flint was beginning to show improvement, many angry residents had experiences that they felt proved otherwise and, more significantly, many "water activists" did not want those findings to be advanced in the media because it might cut across their own activities.
Marc Edwards recently told the WSWS:
And when our data started to show the water was getting better in 2016 after a lot of hard work, [some water activists] wanted me to say it was just as bad as ever, and even it was getting worse! [She] warned me, "Your data is interfering with my politics," and that if we did not stop publishing it, she would turn against us. I told her "You loved us when the scientific data helped your politics, and now you hate us when the scientific data hurts it?" She said yes.
The Shigellosis outbreak
In April 2016, while the FACHEP team was hard at work sowing public distrust in the filters, VT published its report on the second round of water testing with detailed results and analysis showing some improvement in the lead levels. What was discovered was that homes in Flint were using significantly less water -- as low as 20 percent in some cases of the monthly volume considered normal. The VT report outlined three possible reasons:
Efforts by citizens to reduce their water bills. At the time, the city of Flint had the highest water rates in the US. Many residents refused to pay water bills when they stopped using the poisoned water, resulting in ongoing conflicts over accrued water debt and liens on houses.Taking fewer and shorter showers to reduce the likelihood of rashes and other concerns associated with the water.Extensive use of bottled water for bathing, washing dishes, etc.
On the issue of bathing, the report cited Edwards as stating, "Flint residents shouldn't have any more concerns about taking a bath or a shower than residents of any other city." This statement provoked concerns among residents who had experienced rashes and skin conditions.
In June-July 2016, there was an outbreak in Flint of Shigellosis, a disease which exhibits symptoms of dysentery. This gastrointestinal disease is traditionally spread by hand-to-hand contact through exposure to infected feces. According to Wikipedia:
This can occur via contaminated food, water, or hands or sexual contact. Contamination may be spread by flies or when changing diapers... The risk of infection can be reduced by properly washing the hands. There is no vaccine.
Dr. Edwards wrote on Flint Water Study:
After intense scrutiny, which even included out of the box discussion as to whether accepted laws of biology, chemistry, and water treatment applied in Flint (they did, but we mention that because no stone was left unturned), the public health agencies acted on evidence that this was almost certainly a traditional outbreak.[21]
Rather than focusing on the message that careful hygiene should be the public response to the spread of the shigella bacteria, the response of FACHEP was to promote unfounded reports on the danger of the POU filters harboring the pathogen and the transmission of shigella through the water. This of course encouraged the opposite of the needed public response.
The Legionella bacteria
The Legionnaires' Disease outbreak in the summers of 2014 and 2015, which Snyder announced in January 2016, was one of the worst in US history. Legionnaires' Disease is a more pernicious and deadly form of pneumonia caused by the legionella bacteria which breed in water and become airborne. It was later uncovered that the numbers presented by the state likely underestimated the real extent of the outbreak due to misdiagnosis as ordinary pneumonia.
Water systems utilize chlorine to kill the bacteria, but due to the acidic water from the Flint River, not only lead, but iron leached from the pipes. When iron reacts with chlorine, it combines to render the biocidal function of chlorine ineffective, creating conditions for the legionella bacteria to grow in institutional air conditioning systems, such as in hospitals. This is what caused the spike in Legionnaires' disease during the summers -- the period when it is more common -- of 2014 and 2015. When the city stopped drawing water from the Flint River in October 2015 and after the outbreak became publicly known, the threat of the disease became significantly reduced.
The legionella bacteria, which is commonly found in water, becomes a health risk only when it is aerosolized and inhaled into the lungs. Significant research had been done on the growth of Legionella bacteria, including by Dr. Edwards in 2017, and specifically in early 2017 related to Flint's water crisis.[22]
Legionella bacteria became FACHEP's fixation, even though the 2014-15 outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease was proven to be caused be the lack of corrosion control during the period the city was on untreated Flint River water. Nonetheless, FACHEP unrelentingly pushed their predetermined conclusion that Flint residents were continuing to face the danger of exposure to Legionnaires' Disease through the EPA-recommended POU filters.
In October 2016, FACHEP issued a press release that falsely asserted that a significant number of Flint homes in their initial sampling had a lower level of chlorine than recommended by the American Water Works Association (AWWA). The public nature of their assertion put health officials in the impossible situation of having to respond to public fears without any viable data provided by FACHEP to guide it. This resulted in a testy conference call with MDHHS staff including medical officer Eden Wells (more in Part 2).
Pauli wrote in Flint Fights Back, "there was another type of contaminant lurking in the background, one that also offered some hope of explaining unexplained illnesses and impeding the rush to declare the crisis over"[23] [Emphasis added.] He adds that FACHEP was to hold "our first community meeting in mid-December 2016, at which we planned to roll out our preliminary findings directly to residents."[24]
That meeting was held on December 14, 2016, at the Flint Library. This was essentially an ambush of state health officials, who were deceived by the group that nothing new would be presented and that media were not invited. FACHEP's Dr. Susan Love announced that water from the POU filters was unsafe and should be run for several minutes and boiled before using for cooking or bathing.
These misguided directions ran counter to the recommendations of Edwards, the EPA and the Health Department, but were reported in the press[25] and documented in handouts that FACHEP distributed at the event. It apparently did not occur to the team that their unsound instructions could only have a deleterious effect on the recovery of Flint's water system. Pauli explains the group's real reasons for sounding the alarm over the filters and the state of the water, "What really began to arouse activists' sympathies, however, was their burgeoning realization that FACHEP's message about the safety of the water was going to be different from that of Edwards."[26]
To be continued.
[1]
"Study shows Flint, Michigan has 'very serious lead in water problem'" https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/09/15/wate-s15.htm
[2]
"Michigan governor grudgingly admits Flint water danger" https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/02/flin-o02.html
[3]
https://youtu.be/HjmIMJo0Svc?si=f1SA8ln8U1lORZMR
[4]
"Michigan political crisis over lead poisoning in Flint" https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/11/flin-n11.html
[5]
"Dramatic spike in Legionnaires' disease deaths possibly linked to Flint River water" https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/14/legi-j14.html
[6]
https://www.epa.gov/water-research/epanet
[7]
https://flintwaterstudy.org/2019/04/the-tragi-comedy-of-mcelmurrys-flint-hydraulic-model/
[8]
Ibid
[9]
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087724X15606737?journalCode=pwma
[10]
https://flintwaterstudy.org/2019/03/part-10/
[11]
Flint Fights Back by Benjamin Pauli, 2019, page 23
[12]
https://flintwaterstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/1-FACHEP-December-14-press-conference-handout-slides-Q-A-Full.pdf
[13]
Flint Fights Back by Benjamin Pauli, 2019, page 23
[14]
Ibid page 51
[15]
Ibid
[16]
"Citizen Science During the Flint, Michigan Federal Water Emergency: Ethical Dilemmas and Lessons Learned" https://theoryandpractice.citizenscienceassociation.org/articles/10.5334/cstp.154
[17]
The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique by David North, 2015 (Epub version)
[18]
The Pasteurization of France by Bruno Latour, 1993
[19]
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19378629.2017.1408631
[20]
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=O06Ml-YAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=O06Ml-YAAAAJ:f2IySw72cVMC Abstract, page 2
[21]
https://flintwaterstudy.org/2019/01/part-4/
[22]
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es303212a#
[23]
Flint Fights Back by Benjamin Pauli, 2019, page 206
[24]
ibid, page 210
[24]
https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2016/12/state-provided_water_filters_i.html
[26]
Flint Fights Back by Benjamin Pauli, 2019, page 208
Read more10 years since the lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan water supply25 April 2024Cases closed on Flint water crisis criminal prosecutions without any convictions2 November 2023Five years since the poisoning of Flint's water supply: Part one13 May 2019Contact usRelated TopicsFind out more about these topics:The water crisis in Flint, MichiganUS PoliticsThe Politics of the Pseudo-LeftUnited StatesNorth America