pediatrician’s report the week 
before had shown a significant 
jump in the number of Flint 
children 
with 
elevated 
blood 

lead levels, and those samples 
correlated with ZIP codes in 
which independent water samples 
pointed to lead contamination. 
State officials initially discounted 
the data. Eight days later, they 
reversed course. The city would 
again source its water from the 
Detroit River. For the residents of 
Flint, it was too little, too late. They 
had been ringing the alarm over 
the city’s water quality for more 
than a year, almost immediately 
after the city opted to treat its water 
in-house from the Flint River.

Flint had already planned to join 

a new pipeline, the Karegnondi 
Water Authority, which would 
eventually serve mid-Michigan 
and the state’s thumb. Knowing 
Flint had plans to leave, Detroit’s 
water authority said it would stop 
supplying water to the city. At the 
time, Flint was under the control 
of a state-appointed emergency 
financial manager who, in a cost-
saving move, decided that while the 
city waited for the KWA to come 
online, Flint would treat its own 
water for the first time in decades. 
Residents say officials brushed off 
their concerns again and again. 
They reported that water ran from 
their sinks discolored in browns, 
blues and yellows. Then came the 
hair loss, rashes that wouldn’t go 
away, rotting teeth, discolored 
shower tiles. In July, the city’s 
mayor drank a glass of water on 
local morning television to prove 
the water was safe. It wasn’t.

Melissa Mays, a Flint mother 

of four, had brought us here, 
to Calumet Street. Mays, her 
husband, and their four sons were 
all diagnosed with lead poisoning 
last year, and she’s spent months 
working 
with 
Shariff, 
clergy 

members, activists and a ragtag 
collective of Flint residents to 
pressure the city, the state, the feds 
— anyone, really — to do something. 
In their living room, about 10 
minutes from Calumet, Mays’ 
husband applied zombie makeup to 
all four kids, his own face and hands 
already covered in the white, red 
and black paint. Two candelabras 
decorated to look like they were 
covered in spider webs sat atop a 
tablecloth patterned with skulls. 
I slid into a chair next to Derek 
and Ruby, the Daily columnist and 
photographer who joined me on 
the trip. A row of electric guitars 
hung vertically across one wall, 
and another was plastered with the 
kids’ drawings and class projects. 
Mays and Shariff, who had come 
over for the interview, were seated 
on the table’s long side, and I asked 
how the whole debacle started. 
Mays spoke with dizzying speed, 
peppering a timeline of the last two 
years with talk of trihalomethanes, 
parts per billion, Freedom of 
Information Act requests and the 
federal Lead and Copper Rule. 
Mays is not a scientist or policy 
analyst, but it was apparent that, 
out of necessity, this research has 
ended up a full-time endeavor.

Not long after water started 

flowing from the Flint River and 
into taps and showerheads across 
the city, residents started noticing 
their water running yellow and 
brown. It smelled funny, and tasted 
strange, too. People were showing 

up at Flint City Council meetings 
displaying bottles filled with the 
brown-colored water. “It’s a quality, 
safe product,” Flint Mayor Dayne 
Walling said at the time. “I think 
people are wasting their precious 
money buying bottled water.” Four 
months later, water on the city’s 
west side tested positive for E. 
coli, and the city issued a series of 
boil-water advisories. Shariff said 
she only came across the alerts 
accidentally when clicking around 
the city’s website; Mays said she 
didn’t hear about them until after 
the third advisory.

By 
September 
2014, 
Mays 

had enough; she was convinced 
the problem was more than just 
bacteria. She said her cat was 
throwing up, her own hair was 
falling out and a splotchy red rash 
had started to stretch across her 
face. Mays’ 2-year-old niece was 
staying in the house then, and 
every time she took a bath, the 
toddler broke out with a rash all 
over her behind. The rash covered 
only the body parts where the tub’s 
water hit. Eczema cream didn’t 
help, and the child’s doctor couldn’t 
figure out what was wrong.

“And 
I’m 
like, 
‘What 
is 

happening to this kid?’ The rest 
of us were just used to it. Our skin 
was turning scaly,” Mays said. 
“My son — my middle child — just 
had rashes up and down his arms, 
and if you tried to put lotion on it 
— it just burned. It was chemical 
burns. It was on my face, my whole 
cheek bone. And any time you put 
anything on it, even makeup, you 
would just scream because it hurt 
so bad. But they’re on T.V. saying, 
‘Water’s safe, water’s safe, water’s 
safe.’ ”

In January 2014, the city 

distributed 
a 
letter 
notifying 

homeowners that the city had 
violated the federal Safe Drinking 
Water Act — not for lead, but 
for total trihalomethanes. The 
city’s water was found to contain 
a high level of trihalomethanes 
— 
a 
cancer-causing 
chlorine 

byproduct. By this point, members 
of City Council called on the 
governor’s appointed emergency 
manager to abandon the Flint 
River water source, and the city 
of Detroit offered to start selling 
water to Flint again. But Flint’s 
emergency manager opted to 
stay the course. To investigate, 
residents called in a water activist, 
who told Mays not only that she 
shouldn’t drink the water, but that 
she shouldn’t cook or shower with 
it either. And if the city didn’t have 
a lead problem now, he said, they 
would soon. Mays didn’t know it at 
the time, but they already did.

“When you’re boiling the water 

to make spaghetti, you’re just 
making all of those heavy metals 
and all the contaminants basically 
bond together, and you’re basically 
eating poison food. When you wash 
your clothes, the heavy metals stay 
in the fabrics so it’s rubbing against 
your skin all day and god forbid you 
sweat, you’re going to absorb all of 
that through your pores. So I can’t 
wash my dishes here, I can’t do 
my laundry, I can’t move because 
I’m 16 years into a mortgage and 
nobody’s going to buy my poison 
water house.”

Mays takes us into the kids’ 

bathroom. A five-step instruction 
sheet for showering was taped to 
the wall, written by Mays in neat, 
black marker. Step Two: Sit down 
and as the tub fills, use the cup 
and faucet to wash your face and 
hair. Rinse well. Step Four: Brush 

your teeth in the sink using bottled 
water and small cups. Don’t forget 
Q-tips. “Love You!” is scrawled and 
underlined across the bottom. Next 
to it another reminder: “Brush 
Your Hair!” I asked how the kids 
took to the new routine. “It makes 
them angry, and then once we 
found out about the lead, I took out 
the letting the water fill up, so they 
just used a big cup to let it go over 
their heads,” she said. “So yeah, my 
17-year-old son just loves that, to sit 
down and use a cup to shower and 
to use bottled water to brush their 
teeth.”

Mays brought in an outside 

expert to test the water — Marc 
Edwards, a professor at Virginia 
Tech University who specializes in 
water treatment. She said she drove 
62 of the test kits to neighborhoods 
across Flint, picked them up and 
helped residents complete them. 
The lead levels in water at Flint 
resident LeeAnne Walters’ house 
was averaging 2,500 parts per 
billion. Her family was losing hair 
and developing rashes, too. The 
legal level is 15. In a September 
2015 report, Edwards concluded 
that the corrosiveness of Flint’s 
water was causing lead to leach 
from the city’s aging pipes and into 
the water. The state maintained it 
was meeting all lead and copper 
standards.

On Sept. 24, Dr. Mona Hanna-

Attisha, a University alum and a 
pediatrician at the Hurley Medical 
Center Children’s Clinic in Flint, 
cross-referenced that data with 
information the county already 
had — blood lead levels for infants 
at ages 1 and 2, which the state is 
required to test for kids who are 
at a greater risk of ingesting lead 
paint chips in older homes. What 
she found: The number of children 
in Flint with elevated blood lead 
levels — defined as 5 micrograms 
per deciliter or more — had 
increased from 2.1 percent in the 
20 months prior to Sept. 15, 2013, 
to 4 percent between Jan. 1 and 
Sept. 15, 2015. In several ZIP codes, 
those figures increased from 2.5 
percent to 6.3 percent during that 
same time period.

“Everyone who has challenged 

the narrative — which was ‘the 
water is safe to drink’ — they were 
minimized,” Shariff said.

But the evidence built up, and 

eventually it was hard to ignore 
there was a problem. Finally, on 
Oct. 8, 2015 — nearly two years 
after 
Flint 
residents 
started 

drinking water from the Flint 
River — the state changed course 
and announced they had come 
up with a $12 million deal to 
allow the city to return to Detroit 
water. “I’m in full support of the 
return to the Great Lakes Water 
Authority,” Snyder said during 
the announcement. “We all care 
about the citizens of Flint.” Snyder 
promised to convene a task force 
— which includes a University 
professor and several University 
alums — that would determine 
what went wrong. Detroit water 
would again run through Flint’s 
pipes, and Flint’s parents could rest 
easy knowing their kids’ drinking 
water was safe.

But Mays says people shouldn’t 

be so quick to chalk the case up as a 
crisis averted. The story of water in 
Flint is not confined to that period 
of two years when the city’s water 
was unsafe for drinking — or by the 
final hurrah moment in October 
when the good guys fighting the 
good fight won the day. Flint’s 
challenges also reach further, into 

a history colored by the population 
loss and decay that made it easy to 
brush the city aside, as well as into 
a future that these two years will in 
many ways shape.

On the banks of the Flint River

You could argue the city of Flint, 

like a lot of cities, was born from 
the river. The confluences between 
city and water stretch back far — to 
a time when native people fought 
over the river’s banks. A handful 
of fords, where the river could be 
easily traversed, made the land 
highly sought after. In 1819, before 
the great industrial might of Buick 
City generated wealth and helped 
the city’s population grow, and 
before the city’s slide into poverty 
and decay, a fur trapper and his 
wife set up a post near the river’s 
banks. For the traders who came 
here — and to Michigan, a territory 
hugged on four sides by the Great 
Lakes — water was life-giving. The 
rivers provided habitat to beavers, 
and the water ferried birch-bark 
canoes downstream, piled up with 
pelts for sale back East and across 
the vast Atlantic.

In later years, Michigan’s rivers 

and lakes were clogged with logs, 
floated downstream for processing 
into lumber that would build 
this nation’s cities. The water fed 
the state’s growing agricultural 
economy as well as the companies 
that empowered the United States’ 
industrial might — industries that 
allowed old lumber towns across 
the Rust Belt to boom, before 
they would hemorrhage wealth 
and population a few decades 
later. Today, water is the basis 
for Michigan’s wildly successful 
“Pure 
Michigan” 
advertising 

campaign, which helps drive the 
state’s vibrant tourism industry in 
the towns dotting Lake Michigan. 
For a whole lot of Michiganders, 
their Michigan and their Midwest 
does not include the vast and 
aging networks of pipe that 
snake beneath the earth, nor the 
sediment-colored water of the 
rivers Rouge, Flint, Detroit and 
Saginaw.

“We connect to water very 

emotionally, we love our water, 
it’s Pure Michigan, it’s why that ad 
campaign really sings to us,” John 
Austin, a University of Michigan 
lecturer and co-author of a report 
on Michigan’s ‘Blue Economy,’ told 
me during a phone interview later 
in the week. “And so we appreciate 
that even more than this hidden 
water infrastructure that brings us 
clean water and is essential to basic 
life and health.”

Today, one in five jobs in 

Michigan are linked to water, and 
Austin said the state could play a 
major role in developing innovative 
ways to use water more efficiently, 
particularly as water resources 
grow increasingly strained. But as 
much as Michiganders — residents 
of a state whose surrounding Great 
Lakes contain 20 percent of the 
world’s surface freshwater supply 
— love their water resources, 
Austin says it’s easy to forget about 
the hidden infrastructure that 
delivers fresh water to taps on 
demand.

“What Flint really illustrates 

is … as a first order of business, 
we depend on water for life and 
that water has to be clean and 
available to people,” he said. 
“What Flint exposed is our water 
infrastructure — that in every 
community in Michigan we’ve got 
aged infrastructure and this shows 
that since we haven’t invested in 
remaking our water infrastructure 
— in rebuilding those systems — 
they can potentially kill us.”

For 
Austin, 
this 
dynamic 

illustrates the need to invest 
not only in infrastructure above 
ground, such as roads and bridges, 
but also in the infrastructure that 
sits below the surface. With debate 
over paying to fix Michigan’s roads 
reaching a boiling point last spring, 
Austin said people should be just 
as concerned with the invisible 
infrastructure — particularly the 
pipes that shepherd clean drinking 
water into our homes every day.

Through the pipes, below the 

ground

After Halloween, I spent a week 

trying to get into Flint’s water plant. 
When I spoke to Mike Glasgow, 
the city’s utilities director, on the 
phone, he told me how excited he 
was to hear young people were 
interested in municipal water 
delivery. But in the days leading 
up to the final reporting trip to 
Flint, the woman who handles 
his schedule kept telling me to 
call back later; she hadn’t had a 
chance to nail anything down. By 
Thursday evening, I wasn’t getting 
any response at all. I decided I 
would just show up at the facility 
anyway.

The Flint Water Treatment 

Plant sits on a sprawling campus 
just off the freeway. The complex 
is circled with tall chain-link 
fencing topped with barbed-wire 
spirals. A long driveway leads up to 
the main building, which is sand-
colored and doesn’t boast much in 
the way of decorative finishes. A 
white water tower hulks above the 
building, around which another 

half-dozen smaller structures are 
gathered. Only a handful of cars 
congregated in the parking lot, and 
a sign in one of the front windows 
indicated the office entrance is 
around back. Inside, the plant’s 
office was drab and dated. Paper 
maps hang on the paneled walls, 
and a collection of empty lead and 
copper water sampling bottles rest 
on a shelf nearby. I found Brent 
Wright, the plant’s supervisor, in an 
office lined with dozens of binders. 
Wright 
looked 
understandably 

confused when we enter. “Hi, 
we’re here for a tour of the plant,” I 
said enthusiastically. “Mike knows 
we’re coming.” I only half-lied. 
I started to sweat a bit when he 
dialed up Glasgow to make sure 
the story checked out, but when 
Wright hung up the phone, he told 
us, “The best place to start is from 
the beginning.”

Flint’s first water treatment 

plant was built in 1917. The original 
red brick building stands a few 
hundred yards from the present 
facility, and looks a lot like an 
abandoned 
automobile 
factory. 

Many of the square panes of glass 
are smashed in, and Wright tells 
me the roof collapsed a few years 
back. The city built a second 
facility, the current plant, in 1952, 
but it would only operate fully 
until 1967, when the city stopped 
treating its own water and started 
buying it from Detroit. During 
the peak of Flint’s prosperity 
and population, when sprawling 
factories turned thousands of 
GM cars off production lines, 
both 
plants 
together 
pumped 

100 million gallons of water per 
day. Today, with most of those 
factories shuttered and the city’s 
population significantly depleted, 
the Flint plant was only pumping 
about 16 million gallons daily 
when it last operated in October. 
In 1960, 196,940 people lived in 
Flint, according to the U.S. Census. 
Today, 99,002 people call this 
33-square-mile city home.

With the city back on Detroit 

water, there wasn’t much going 
inside Flint’s water treatment 
plant during the visit. The final 
gallons of Flint River water had 
just been emptied out the week 
before. A few construction workers 
wearing hard hats moved through 
the massive building’s darkened 
cement 
corridors, 
getting 
the 

place ready for the KWA pipeline 
to go live a few years down the 
road. The process for cleaning and 
distributing water is not incredibly 
simple. 

Read more online at 
michigandaily.com

2014. Schlissel has expressed 
his appreciation for Hackett in 
interviews with the Daily, saying 
his selection has led to a period 
of stability for a department 
fraught 
with 
controversy 

throughout Brandon’s tenure.

Hackett also earned praise 

from 
around 
campus 
when 

he penned an open letter to 
Michigan football fans in the 
wake of the Wolverines’ last-
second loss to Michigan State 
on Oct. 17, disparaging fans 
who sent angry messages to 
Michigan punter Blake O’Neill 
after his botched punt attempt 
led to a game-winning Spartans 
touchdown as time expired. 

Michigan 
men’s 
basketball 

coach John Beilein indicated 
soon 
after 
Hackett’s 
hiring 

that he would be willing to 
participate in a potential search 
committee 
for 
a 
long-term 

replacement. 
He 
reiterated 

that willingness on Tuesday 
following the Wolverines’ win at 
North Carolina State. 

“I think it’s really important,” 

Beilein said, recalling that he 
also participated in Brandon’s 
selection process. “When we do 
hire a new athletic director — 
when it comes, when Jim decides 
to step down — that the coaches 
are involved. Whether it’s me or 
another coach, it doesn’t make a 
difference.”

In a September interview with 

the Daily, Schlissel declined 
to outline a plan for filling the 
position.

“I’m not prepared at the 

current time to lay out a longer-
term game plan,” he said. “We’ve 
had a lot of stuff we’re doing 
right now. You know with the 
football 
program, 
when 
the 

head coach changes, the whole 
program changes.”

University spokesman Rick 

Fitzgerald declined to comment 
when contacted by the Daily 
on Tuesday evening. Several 
members of the University’s 
Board of Regents could not be 
reached for comment Tuesday 
evening. 

Daily Sports Editor Simon 

Kaufman and Managing News 
Editor Sam Gringlas contributed 
reporting. 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, December 2, 2015 — 3A

of 
MOOCs 
represent 
two 

complementary 
goals: 

increasing 
access 
to 
high-

quality education for global 
learners, 
and 
reimagining 

residential education for the 
21st century,” DeVaney wrote.

In an October interview with 

The Michigan Daily, University 
Provost Martha Pollack said 
there were several institutional 
priorities for digital education 
at the University as a whole, 
including 
online 
course 

offerings like MOOCs.

She pointed, in particular, 

to enhancing the residential 
educational 
experience 

through programs that track 
student 
analytics 
such 
as 

Student 
Explorer 
and 
Art 

Education 2.0, offering online 
degrees in a small targeted 
number of cases and engaging 
a global audience.

“We’ve been very involved 

in digital education now — 
for many many years, but 
particularly have ramped up 
the activity over the last four or 

five years,” Pollack said. “And 
I think it’s really important 
when we think about digital 
education, not just to think 
about MOOCs but to think 
about 
things 
like 
Student 

Explorer and Art 2.0 and all 
kinds of innovative ways that 
students and faculty can make 
use of the technology to have a 
better learning experience.”

Charles 
Severance, 

clinical 
associate 
professor 

of information who teaches a 
5-sequence Coursera course on 
Python programming that was 
launched this September, said 
global engagement was one 
of the biggest benefits of the 
platform.

Severance noted that his 

online student roster consists 
of a wide variety of ages and 
professions.

“There’s a lot of learners in 

the world and we’re meeting 
their demand as educators,” he 
said.

Pollack said she felt reaching 

a global audience is strongly 
in line with the University’s 
priorities.

“A third goal (of digital 

education) is to reach out 

to the world, just like we do 
when we write papers, or we 
do performances, or we do 
op-ed pieces to share what we 
know with the world,” she said. 
“And I think that that is just 
completely aligned with our 
mission as a public university.”

Severance said as a professor, 

the 
self-paced 
nature 
of 

MOOCs is also a significant 
benefit 
over 
traditional 

in-person 
classes 
because 

they allow him to add optional 
bonus lessons on interesting 
topics that would normally 
be left out in a semester-long 
residential course due to time 
constraints.

In his experience, he said, 

they’ve also proven to be less 
work during the semester. 
Aside from the phase where a 
MOOC’s lectures are recorded 
and 
the 
inaugural 
session 

where any errors are resolved, 
these courses often require no 
more than one hour per week 
of the primary instructor’s 
time.

However, 
Severance 
also 

noted that the self-paced and 
impersonal nature of MOOCs 
prevents instructors such as 

himself from placing the same 
kind of pressures on students 
that would be possible in a 
physical classroom.

“The only real disadvantage 

(with MOOCs) is that there’s 
no real time pressure, so we 
have to come up with ways 
to deal with this,” Severance 
said, adding that he typically 
structures a MOOC to be half 
the speed of a corresponding 
university course.

Because the courses are 

self-paced and many of the 
participants are not full-time 
students, time conflicts often 
prevent enrollees from being 
able to complete the course. 
Of the 209,628 visitors to his 
introductory 
Python 
class 

since September 15, only 18,162 
students had completed it as of 
November 30.

“It’s 
understandable, 

because they all have lives 
outside of online learning,” 
Severance said.

According 
to 
DEI, 
the 

University’s 
MOOCs 
have 

attracted more than 3 million 
users over the past several 
years.

MOOCS
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FLINT
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SEARCH
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RUBY WALLAU/Daily

Flint resident Lee Walters demonstrates the slow water stream used by the federal Lead and Copper tests in her relatives 
kitchen on Nov. 6, 2015. 

