Flint Residents Take Clean Water Fight to Federal Court

Michigan's governor renewed his pledge to fix the water crisis in the long-depressed city of Flint on Wednesday, but a group of residents want a federal court to make sure it gets done.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday morning asks a judge to make sure that a permanent solution to the problem of lead-tainted water in Flint gets carried out as soon as possible, and with the public properly informed in the meantime.

"We believe that not asking the court to order these activities would be foolish," said Henry Henderson, the Midwest director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups suing on behalf of Flint residents. "The ability of the state, the city, and the federal government to do their duty has been demonstrated to be lacking."

The suit asks a judge to order authorities "to actually obey the law as opposed to flout it," Henderson said. That means proper testing of the city's water and sharing "accurate and reliable" results with Flint residents, "as opposed to telling them that the brown, stinky, poisonous water that's coming out of their tap is safe."

The lawsuit invokes the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to demand the complete replacement of all lead pipes in Flint "at no cost to customers."

Flint was the birthplace of General Motors, which employed about 80,000 people there in the late 1970s. But GM started closing plants shortly after that, snapping the city's economic backbone. Flint's poverty rate now tops 40 percent, and municipal revenues have collapsed as the city has shrunk to about half its 1970 population.

Flint once got its water from Lake Huron via Detroit's water system, but made plans to switch to a cheaper system under construction 2013. In the meantime, it started drawing water from the Flint River — a waterway polluted with high levels of industrial waste and agricultural runoff. Not only that, but the city didn't treat that corrosive water with chemicals that prevent it from leaching lead out of the aging pipes that route water around town.

The water that started pouring from Flint's faucets in April 2014 was "discolored, laden with sediment, and foul-smelling," the lawsuit reads. Residents complained immediately, their anger fueled by the fact that the decision was made by an "emergency manager" appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder's administration, displacing the elected mayor and city council.

The crisis has become a national embarrassment for Snyder, a Republican former computer executive and financier elected on a promise to bring conservative reform to Michigan. Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said the crisis wouldn't have happened "in a rich suburb of Detroit." Clinton's leading rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, called on Snyder to resign. And Michael Moore, a liberal provocateur whose breakthrough documentary "Roger & Me" chronicled his hometown's decline, has called for Snyder's arrest.

Snyder declined comment on the lawsuit during a news conference in Flint, but repeated his promise to make things right there.

"We'll properly answer the lawsuit filed, but let's take care of the people of Flint," he said. "It's about making sure they, short-term, have bottled water, filters, everything they need. Then, how do we get good water coming out of the taps, and then, rebuilding the community."

And Flint Mayor Karen Weaver said the city has hired Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech water-quality expert who raised early alarms about lead levels there, to help address the problem.

"He is fully independent, he will be reporting to me, and he is funded by private donations," Weaver said.

Related: Protesters Demand Michigan Governor's Resignation During State of the State Speech on Flint Water Crisis

Snyder apologized to Flint in his State of the State address last week, telling residents, "No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe." The head of the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) resigned in December; his agency had dismissed concerns even after a pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, documented an increase in lead levels in Flint children.

The governor declared a state of emergency on January 5, and state police and the National Guard have distributed more than 186,000 cases of bottled water and more than 94,000 filters to residents since then, state police Capt. Chris Kelenske told reporters Wednesday.

The federal government hasn't gone unscathed, either. The US Environmental Protection Agency's regional director for the upper Midwest resigned last week after the agency disclosed that it had known about the problems by February 2015, but said nothing publicly. But Henderson said the state DEQ is still arguing with the EPA over how to address the crisis.

"Despite the apologies the governor articulated, his agency is whining and resisting," Henderson said, adding, "There still remains a certain lack of clarity on the concept that citizens who have been poisoned deserve to have the situation fixed."

In October, Snyder ordered the city to reconnect to Detroit's water system. But the damage to the pipes means lead will keep getting into Flint's water, Henderson said. And while the problems confronting Flint may be extreme, he said they highlight the kind of problem that other American cities with aging infrastructure may have to grapple with in the future.

"The connection of our polluted water systems to our inadequate drinking-water infrastructure and the failure of our legal infrastructure are three interrelated structural problems," he said. "All of these need to be fixed, and it's all manifest in the Flint crisis, but it's something we all have to take seriously."

Follow Matt Smith on Twitter: @mattsmithatl

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