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.