How Flint, Michigan, Got Its Water Crisis

Mona Hanna-Attisha, What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

Flint, Michigan’s water crisis began as a rumor—and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, head of pediatric residents at Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital in Flint, pooh-poohed those rumors. The water’s fine, she reassured her patients. Don’t hesitate to mix it with baby formula, and certainly drink more water than soda. Until an old friend brought evidence, she refused to believe city water had more lead than a contaminated smelting plant.

Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s memoir of the Flint water crisis hit shelves just as the city made the decision to stop distributing potable water to residents whose tap water still flows brown. She makes a persuasive case that the water crisis resulted from human actions, and has human solutions. What’s more, she demonstrates the official intransigence that made this national disgrace possible. Too many powerful people keep turning blind eyes.

There is no scientifically safe level for lead in water or food. None. Even the slightest amount has lifelong health consequences once it gets inside the human body. But a leaked EPA report, which political appointees strove to bury, revealed Flint’s municipal tap water had lead contamination running sixty times the EPA’s official “action level” where regulations consider panic acceptable. Rather than fixing the lead, appointees tried to discredit the source.

When Dr. Hanna-Attisha brought these findings to Flint’s public health administrators, they offered a stunning response: water isn’t a public health concern. Take it to municipal utility people. Thus begins a bureaucratic runaround in which, even when appointed leaders acknowledge the problem exists, actual actions are somebody else’s responsibility. Apparatchiks would rather defend their shrinking administrative patches than serve public good.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha

Dr. Hanna-Attisha mixes personal memoir, political exposé, and history of public health concern. She didn’t come into her advocacy position accidentally. Her personal history positioned her perfectly to speak when public adversity came her way. Daughter of Iraqi Christian refugees who fled Saddam’s arbitrary purges, she inherited a passion for solving looming social problems. Her parents taught her the importance of education, and commitment to causes bigger than herself.

Public health, as a discipline, arises because human communities have become too large, interconnected, and complex for individuals to take responsibility for their private health. Hanna-Attisha describes John Snow, the Victorian Englishman who first connected London’s frequent cholera outbreaks with improper sewage disposal. There, as with the Flint water crisis, officials refused to believe their continuing policies created disastrous health consequences downstream.

For Dr. Hanna-Attisha, public policy, private health, the managed health system, and information distribution are linked issues. She describes how efforts to control access to information kept people, including herself, ignorant of the water crisis long after accumulations of lead had measurable health impact. And the lack of coordination within the health system prevented alarms from sounding, even after science began gathering evidence. No problem happens in isolation.

The Flint water crisis didn’t just happen. Flint elected an idealistic young mayor and an activist council to offset the continuing economic drains caused when General Motors abandoned the city. Yet the state, utilizing emergency management law, stepped in, overruled the city council, and began a program of cutting financial costs, without regard for human consequences. One of the first changes, was shifting Flint onto a dirt-cheap, but untested, municipal water source.

This isn’t coincidental. Flint, a majority Black city in a majority White state, had its elected city government overruled unilaterally. Dr. Hanna-Attisha points out that nearly every emergency manager in Michigan oversees a majority Black community. She compares the outcome to the Tuskegee experiments. Black Michiganders don’t know where their water, civil defense, sanitation, and other basic services come from, which Michigan is okay with, because they’re poor.

Once Hanna-Attisha becomes aware of the evidence for measurable health problems from contaminated water, she pushes public officials to do something. She initially maintains her faith in the system—after all, she’s employed by the Michigan State University system, she’s a public servant too. Only when they prove deaf to public entreaty, immune to scientific evidence, and more beholden to bureaucracy than common good, does she shift focus to strategic media appeals.

Dr. Hanna-Attisha isn’t what you’d normally consider a public revolutionary. She’s a teacher and doctor, someone who does her job for the love. But in her telling, her love of children and medicine made public resistance necessary. Reality backed her into a corner, and she responded with action. Like the best movie heroes, Hanna-Attisha was prepared to do the right thing, and she acted. That makes her a hero.