As state and local officials in Michigan struggle to address the lead contamination in Flint, new data show that other municipalities and private water systems in Michigan may be headed down the same path. MLive reports:
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality records show that six private water supplies in Michigan and two municipalities — not including Flint — meet or exceed the federal limit on lead and copper in water tested at the customer tap.
Another six private and 16 municipal systems across the state, ranging in size from 25 customers to more than 120,000, tested for levels that are below the U.S. federal limit, but above safety benchmarks used by the World Health Organization, the international public health arm of the United Nations, and the Virginia Tech university team that helped blow the whistle in Flint.
Michigan cities with lead at or above the WHO benchmark include Kalamazoo, Muskegon Heights, Benton Harbor, Owosso, Ionia, Marysville and St. Louis.
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"I think Flint is the tip of the iceberg," said Yanna Lambrinidou, an assistant science and technology studies professor at Virginia Tech. Lambrinidou, alongside civil engineering professor Marc Edwards, spent years researching the lead contamination that plagued Washington, D.C. between 2001 and 2004 — a major poisoning that echoes in the Flint crisis more than a decade later.
Towns elsewhere in the Rust Belt, such as Sebring, Ohio, are also facing lead problems in their drinking water. Although Flint’s situation is especially awful for its citizens and while extraordinarily poor governance led to its crisis, it is indicative of a larger problem in these poor cities left behind by industry, and of the infrastructure problems that plague working-class and poor towns across America. All places with lead pipes need to replace them, and all places with lead paint need remedies, but state governments too often ignore lead abatement programs—or in New Jersey’s case simply reappropriate their money elsewhere. What happens next is the classic American story. The people on the margins who are already struggling lose.