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elorant

The article failed to explain how the river got so toxic in the first place.

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Problem is the pipes, not the river per se. When they switched water, they didn't add an anti corrosive agent:

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/11/13/af...

>> Problem is the pipes, not the river per se. When they switched water, they didn't add an anti corrosive agent

Which means there is now corrosion in a lot of old lead pipes, which means the lead will continue to get into the water for a while. IIRC at least a few months after they switched back and possibly longer.

And the water, it sounds like it's substantially more corrosive than their previous water supply.

"Over the summer, researchers from Virginia Tech found that Flint River water is highly corrosive. That means when it comes into contact with lead from service lines, household pipes or solder, it eats away at the lead and sends it right to people's faucets."

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/29/444497051/high-lead-levels-in-...

From another source:

> "The Flint River has a history of poor water quality due to industrial pollution and agricultural runoff, according to an assessment by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. But efforts to remove pollutants and clean up the river have been successful in the past 40 years. Now, some are wondering if the problem lies in the city’s treatment of the water, which differs from its treatment of its previous water source, Lake Huron."

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/05/3666238/flint-mi...

The area is known for mining and industry, its environment has been shit on for a century now.

Just a guess, but there's a lot of industrial history in that area, so the river itself has probably been toxic for a very long time.

The river is a lot better than it was 20-40 years ago. It used to not freeze. You used to be only able to eat fish out of there once a month.

The article also fails to explain what kind of safety checks are normally done on US drinking water, and why those tests failed in Flint.

I suspect none of that is explained yet because it is not yet known. Formally declaring "this is an emergency" is the first step in getting outside help, but I also imagine it's the first necessary step for starting an investigation into why it happened.

They know why it happened. That was the first step. They failed to put an anti-corrosive agent in the water, and it released lead from old pipes into the water supply.

There's no such thing as "US drinking water".

I live on a farm where my water source is a well. I live next to a subdivision where all the residents are on a single shared well. That subdivision is next to a city which draws its water from a local lake. That city borders another city which has a system of wells to draw from the local aquifer. In our local region is another city which draws from a large river. About 2 hours away is the city of Chicago which draws from Lake Michigan.

Each of those water systems operates independently. Each local body is responsible for determining the quality of their source and ameliorates it as needed. You can imagine that as you progress up the chain from my house to Chicago, this same process gets more and more sophisticated, but the basic process is the same.

A city the size of Flint, even with their recent financial trouble, certainly has a water department which knows what the quality of the water it's putting out is. As for culpability, whatever else you may have heard about the US, we do hold people accountable when they knowingly put the public health at risk. In fact, the article even mentions that Flint's previous mayor was ousted over this very issue.

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