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
From Page 1A

FLINT
From Page 1A

SEARCH
From Page 1A

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.