A Lesson From Flint

With Charleston, West Virginia's water system catastrophe still fresh in our memories, another Rust Belt city, Flint, Michigan, finds itself in an even more unpleasant predicament.  While Charleston's troubles seemed to have passed with little permanent damage or health consequences, Flint seems to be cursed by high lead levels that may remain for some time. More alarmingly, the health impacts on some children may be serious and long lasting.  Neither disaster should occur in America in 2016 and, like so many other man-made environmental calamities, both were avoidable.  It should cause us to take pause and appreciate the exceptional water quality we enjoy and the well-run water systems that bring it to us here in Blair County. 

The Flint story is complicated.  Having lost nearly 100,000 people the last half century, Flint is one of many Michigan cities that crashed after the American automotive industry faded in the seventies.  Now about half the size it was in 1960, Flint has found itself in the midst of financial and social collapse.  While still flush with money and people in 1964, they planned to build a pipeline to bring water from Lake Huron.  But financial troubles forced them to buy water from the City of Detroit.  Prompted by Flint's financial collapse, but also dissatisfied with the City of Detroit, Flint explored other options in recent years. 

When they decided to buy water from a regional water company, they had to find another source of water until the new supplier could finish the pipeline.  Their only other choice seemed to be extraction from the Flint River.  The quality of the river water had always been a concern, but desperate times called for desperate measures.  Flint began drawing water from the river in spring of 2014, still waiting for their new pipeline to be completed.

The Flint River water was high in iron and very corrosive.  Flint's distribution system had many lead pipes and the corrosive nature of the water dissolved the lead, a potent neurotoxin.  This might have gone unnoticed but a local pediatrician detected high lead levels in the blood tests of children suffering from a variety of inexplicable health problems.  Both the Charleston and Flint tales testify to the risks that arise anytime a community draws water from a river that has passed by larger industrial cities, their sewage treatment facilities and the farmland that surrounds them. 

Blair and many counties in similar geographic circumstances usually draw their water from tree-covered headwaters that generally generate high quality water, even before it undergoes any treatment.  Reservoirs from Hollidaysburg to Tyrone are served by creeks and streams that originate on the forested Allegheny Front or Brush Mountain.  Besides this accident of geography, Altoona Water Authority's watershed protection coordinator Tobias Nagle, explains that Blair County water systems have been proactive in avoiding problems like Flint's.  Besides daily lab testing, the authority has had a corrosion control and prevention program in place for decades.  Particularly when difficulties arise like those in Flint and Charleston, we should be reminded of the importance of both watershed protection and the preventive programs that help us to avoid serious water quality problems.