March 25, 2016 • 39 mins
What's in the water in Flint? Did city officials really cover up a potentially deadly situation? Tune in as Ben, Matt and Noel look into the Stuff They Don't Want You to Know about the Flint water crisis.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is My name
(00:21):
is Noel. I am. Then you argue and that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. This podcast
has been a long time coming. Why don't we open
up the show with first things? First? Shut up corners. Okay,
it's shout out corner today. We'd like to start out
(00:42):
with a shout out to Tom's sort Aden and everyone
else listening in Norway. Wow. Yes, and uh, we have
a phrase here that I watched a YouTube video on
and how to say it correctly? Um, here we go,
Hi vordin gorda. Hopefully that's at least somewhere at least
one of the three of us pronounced it correctly, and
(01:05):
with our three pronunciation skills combined, maybe it made you
know some kind of sense. I think it's supposed to
be said at least three times faster than that, But
I don't, I don't, I don't know how to do that.
We sounded like a very drunken person trying to speak
Norwegian shout out to you. Tom, Who's next, We've got
Nate Clump and Nate, you're probably working on a bike
(01:28):
right now while you're listening to this, and we can
only hope that this is the easiest fix that you're
gonna have all day and you get a little time
to go do something for yourself. Consider it, you know.
I mean some people they like the long processes so
they can listen to more podcasts. Oh yeah, you're right.
I hope that the current bike that you're working on
is the hardest job you've ever done, so you can
finish this podcast and they end right, they end together,
(01:50):
just perfect, because that is very satisfying. It's like when
you pull up to your house and that NPR story
and you don't have to have that, you know. It's
like when you walk to the microwave and then it
stops right as you get, right as you approach it.
Am I the only person who pretends them diffusing a
bomb at the last second When I stopped a microwave.
(02:11):
I always like to open the door with only a
single second remaining. That's just like a no C D
Thing's and our final shout out for today's shout Out
Corner goes to Marie ferminjured, I hope you're saying that correctly,
and her mom Sabrina, we had a question about this,
right mat Yeah, Marie, we're wondering are you really five
(02:33):
years old? Or is there something you don't want us
or your mom to know. Yes, shout out to you, Marie,
and we hope you enjoy the food that your mom
has prepared for you. We we assume that it is
most nutritious and delicious. And with this we end our
shout Out Corners. And that brings us to today's episode
(02:56):
of We're traveling from the Shout Out Corner across the globe,
taking you with us to the Upper Peninsula or the
lower Peninsula. No, to Michigan, to Michigan just by the
Great Lakes, which is weird because Michigan, if you look
at it as a child, I can see how it
would be very confusing to anyone to say, why is
(03:18):
that one state? Yeah, most of what I know about
Michigan has come from two places. One the wonderful Sufian
Stephen's record Michigan, which is where he grew up. And
if you want to hear a really excellent epic sweeping
orchestral piece of music. That's a good place to start,
and every song has kind of like personifies a different
(03:38):
part of Michigan. That's where I learned about the Upper
Peninsula and all that UM. And then the second place
I learned about it, which is very pertinent to our
topic today, was the movie Roger and Me, which was
Michael Moore's first documentary where he who you know, he
grew up in Michigan Flint as well UM, and he
pursues the then CEO of the General Motors Company, Roger Smith,
(04:00):
to bring him take him to task for UM shutting
down all of the manufacturing facilities in Flint, which was
the heart of that city's economy, and it just, you know,
plummeted the city and its residents into poverty, and a
lot of the issues that we're talking about today likely
began back then in terms of infrastructure and things not
(04:23):
being you know, looked after sure, as the money just
wasn't coming in anymore to the to the counties, into
the city, which is an unfortunate story in a country
where the manufacturing base was being off shore at such
a precipitous rate for a time. Yeah, that you have
family in Michigan. Yeah, I have family the A couple
of them live right outside of Detroit. I think they're
(04:46):
on the northern side of Detroit, but I'm not exactly positive.
And then I've got a whole another section that live
just north of Flint, so basically north and south of Flint,
so roughly twenty miles on one side, forty or so
miles on the other side. So they I spoke to
them this week actually, right before we're recording this, just
to kind of get some idea of what they're seeing,
(05:08):
if anything there, and both said that they haven't seen
really any effects. They didn't even learn about it until
Rachel Maddow talked about it on her show. So how
far how far outside of Flint are they? Twenty miles
north and then I think, I don't know exactly, but
closer to Detroit on the south. It's a different water system, Yeah,
(05:28):
completely different water system, and they don't know a lot
of people personally. One thing that my cousin said is
that Flint is such a place where you don't really
go to Flint if you're not from Flint. It's which
is a kind of a sad thing. Um, but when
you live in that community. You just live in that community.
(05:50):
And if you don't, you don't write not a big
tourist space. You're saying, sure, yeah for anything. Well, one
thing that Flint, Michigan has, unfortunately in common with many
other cities across the US, and this will be a
US centric podcast, one thing that all these cities have
in common is a terrifyingly bad infrastructure situation. For quite
(06:14):
a few people, in the post World War two era,
the United States was seen as the shining beacon of success,
despite of course, the enormous internal problems the country had
with discrimination, prejudice on gender and ethnicity and creed and religion.
The thing was there was it was a booming economy
(06:37):
where someone could have what today would be seen as
maybe a minimum wage job, but still afforda house, maybe
one spouse stays at home, afford to raised kids. And
one other thing that was amazing was this infrastructure. The
fact that unlike so many other countries, you could hop
into the car that you bought probably was still an
(06:59):
ownership society back then, and you could just drive from
one coast to the other and then back right. No
border controls unless you you know, you go to Mexico
or Canada, and there's this huge nation with these great roads,
and that is no longer the case. In recent years,
this thing has, this infrastructure thing has declined dramatically. According
(07:23):
to the American Society of Civil Engineers, people who are
paid just to look at this stuff, one and nine
of the bridges in the US was rated structurally deficient
as and that gave the bridges a score of a
C plus, which is actually one of the better scores
that the United States infrastructure got. Yeah, that's the worst
(07:45):
part relative to other parts of the US infrastructure that's
relatively good. They have a we have a quote from
them that the a s C said at the time, quote,
our infrastructure systems are failing to keep pace with the
current and expanding needs and investment and infrastructure is faltering.
And there are signs of hope. The a s c
s report card that they issued gave a slightly improved
(08:08):
grade to infrastructure overall compared to two thousand and nine.
But that's here's the problem. It's not just a road
or a bridge, you know, it's something that politically is
difficult for to get people to vote for. No one
wants to pay attacks for something like that, until you know,
the hurricane hits and the levies break or the bridge collapses,
(08:31):
and then everyone's looking to point fingers in place blame, right,
why didn't you do this? Why didn't you Why didn't
you make us vote the way you wanted has to vote?
I mean, and it makes sense because it is unpopular
when it comes to getting the job done. No one
wants a lane of of you know, busy intersection closed off.
No one wants to be late to work because there's
(08:52):
you know, work being done on the you know, the
road they drive on. No one wants to you know,
have their street dug up and pipes you know, ripped out,
and you know, and we're moving on, obviously to you
know the big subjective today, which is water systems. And
you know, you got to think about these systems that
were in place, you know, just long, long ago, and
(09:15):
we've had to kind of just keep repairing and patching
and fixing these things little by little, because can you
imagine what it would take to just put up let's
just put a whole new water system into our you know,
metropolitan city, right, especially when we consider how funding arrives
those things, we won't get too, won't get too bogged
down in those details, but just for just for some perspective,
(09:39):
the the Infrastructure report Card that we're mentioning projects that water,
the funding we need to safely restructure the US water
system is gonna total out to a hundred and twenty
six billion. We have forty two billion of that and
these are two thousand ten dollars, so appreciate the inflation there,
(10:02):
and that means that the Uncle SAM is eighty four
billion dollars short. On an unpopular thing. At the dawn
of the twenty one century, most of our drinking much
of our drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of
its life. These things, because you know, these things are
constantly in an eroding environment. Water is moving all the time.
(10:27):
A lot of this stuff is really old, back before
we understood the safety implications. So we have some good
and bad news. So there's an estimated two forty thousand
water main breaks per year in the U s alone,
assuming that every single pipe would need to be replaced,
the cost over the coming decades could reach more than
(10:47):
a trillion dollars. And that's according to the American water
Works Association, which is crazy, but there's good news. Yeah. Well,
the good news is that in a lot of places
in the US, the sinking water that you're going to
get from a fountain that is meant for human consumption
is pretty high. It's potable. Yeah, overall, it's pretty good stuff.
(11:09):
Even though the pipes and the mains that are running
underneath the city and throughout it are are pretty old,
frequently more than a hundred years old. And when they're
that old, they need replacement, especially depending on what they're
made from. Like there are some older wooden pipes that
still exists. There are some pipes that may or may
not contain a little bit of lead in them. Uh,
(11:29):
there are huge issues with that. And this is because
the water is treated, right, I mean it right, the water.
The water treatment system is one of the biggest parts.
And the good thing about this is that getting sick
from drinking the water is a pretty rare thing in
this country. Right. That's where we're gonna that's That's a
great way to set up this point because for quite
(11:50):
a few people in the US, traveling to another country
is is difficult and it's expensive. You know, they're they're
two oceans on either side, and as a result. Sometimes
in the international community, people who live in this country
are accused of not having an entirely realistic understanding of
(12:12):
how how stuff works, although I hate to say it
that way, in other in other parts of the world.
And with that being said, you know, one one of
the things that I think escapes a lot of people
is just how profoundly important safe water is to any civilization.
You know, there are places around the world where you're
(12:33):
just not gonna drink the water. And it's not it's
not because you are not acclimated to bacteria or whatever
is in there. It's because no one can drink the water.
And this this sort of sanitation is a huge deal,
and we are conscious of that, folks. But we are
also conscious of the increasingly deteriorating system in here in
(12:55):
the US. So we have examples for you. In October
two twelve, her Acane sandy not large coastal sewage plants
offline and caused nearly forty two million cubic meters that's
eleven billion gallons of sewage to go into the water supply. Ah,
what do you do from from you know, can you
(13:17):
imagine being the people tasked to fix that? All right? Guys,
let's pump this out of here. Well, it's water, and
now it's just got sewage in it. Huh. In January,
a storage tank in West Virginia that held the chemical
used in coal production leaked into the Elk River and
it's spilled an estimated forty cubic meters, which is ten
(13:39):
thousand gallons, just upstream of the water intake for Charleston,
the state capital there. Now here's the problem. Almost three
hundred thousand people were without tap water for at least
four days when that happened. Now you have to think
I've been without I think you guys may have gone
through this. Here in Atlanta somewhere, we've been without tap
(14:01):
order for a few days because of some small thing
or a main leak or something like that. It's crazy
how much of a wrench it throws into your world
when you don't have running potable water. Actually, in my
hometown in Augusta, Georgia and North Augusta, which is the
on the border of Georgia and South Carolina, but it's
like right over the bridge, they're really closely on one another.
(14:22):
Um they have been having all these boil advisories lately,
and they haven't quite determined what the problem is, and
they keeps coming up. It's very strange. And I mean
even just think about that, just like adding that step
having to boil your water and then when you got
to cool it again, I guess you can ice it
or would you wait to leave it out and put
it in the fridge. I don't know what. And it
just seems like a whole you know. Or do you
(14:44):
go out and you buy privatized water from someplace in
a in a jug or in and it's not cheap,
so I don't know, it's it's crazy. So one of
the big points that we're obviously making here, folks, is
that while the situation in Flint, Michigan may have been
one of the first to really garner national attention, it's
(15:07):
not really unique. It's not especially exceptional in terms of
uh substandard infrastructure. These kind of these kind of breaks
are happening in in the modern age. This is not
necessarily an isolated incident. And we're going to dive into,
(15:28):
maybe that's a poor choice of words, the situation in Flint, Michigan.
After a word from our sponsor, and we're back. We're
back in Michigan, we're back in Flint, Michigan, specifically where
things started to go wrong in recent months. You have
(15:51):
no doubt heard about the crisis with lead contamination in
the city of Flint, Michigan. We have a little bit
of a timeline that can walk you through here. In
two thousand eleven, Michigan takes over the Flint budget. They
take over the town's budget because there were years of
rampant poverty spurred in part by the loss of auto manufacturing.
(16:15):
Like you mentioned earlier, no Flint is in a financial
state of emergency. Michigan takes over and when they take over,
the governor at the time, Rick Snyder, appoints an emergency
financial manager. And this manager was, according to a congressman
named Dan Kildee, this manager was hired to do one thing.
(16:37):
I'll actually read the quote. You had one job, man,
one job. Simply do one thing and one thing only,
and that's cut the budget at any cost. Yikes. So
one option for a budget cutting thing is to stop
paying Detroit for that Sweet Lake Huron water and start
using water from the Flint River because that's safe, right,
(17:01):
And so they do a study. This is all the
two thousand eleven the study finds that for Flint River
water to be considered drinkable, it would need to be
treated with an anti corrosion agent, and water treatment will
cost the state about a hundred dollars a day. Adding
this treatment, by the way, in retrospect, would have present
(17:21):
prevented of the town's later problems. So these complaints are
mounting over the years. Let's let's fast forward to a
little bit more recently. In two thousand fourteen April, Flint
officials to combat these rumors about just how terrible water
is in Flint, they publicly drink the river water in
(17:42):
front of the media. Yeah, the mayor right right, yes, okay,
So at this point the Mayor's drink the water on television.
Everyone's you know, maybe not everyone, but it looks like
it's gonna be okay. We're gonna switch over to the
Flint River. We're running it through a treatment plant. It's
gonna be okay. So in April, work team that happens. Now,
this is meant to be just a temporary solution, right,
(18:04):
This isn't there. The idea isn't to stay on the
Flint River water forever. I mean, are they trying? How
how are they going to raise the money to pay Detroit. Yeah,
this is just a budget cutting move. If it's a
budget cutting move. So eventually they're going to get the
water from Huron. From Lake Huron, which they're right next to.
I mean it's not right next to it, it's not
far away. So they're thinking maybe two years they can
(18:24):
make a state runs supply line. Problem is that in
comparison to Lake Huron's water, h Virginia Tech researchers find
that Flint River, the Flint River water supply is nineteen
times more corrosive. So then in May is when the discolored,
(18:44):
bad tasting, bad smelling water starts actually making its way
into Flint residents homes via their their faucets. This stuff
is brown, Yeah, this stuff is objectively brown. This stuff
looks like soup and not not you know, not a
good soup, none, a nice biscu or something. And it's
not one of those things where maybe there's a little
(19:05):
junk in the system where you turn on your faucet
if you haven't turned it on in a long time,
and it kind of goes out and then you get
the nice water. You can get a little bit of
rust or something like that, and then it clears out, No,
it's not like that. But not to mention the fact
that the city officials continue telling the residents it's fine, Okay,
it's fine, attention to the soup in the water, go well,
(19:29):
And and then there are there are large swasters of
the population that have to continue using this water because
they cannot afford to have another water source, at least
in some way. Well, there's not another water source. They'd
have to buy bottle That's what I'm saying. So they
don't have they don't have the means to go out
and buy bottled water. So we're talking like not even
(19:50):
a boil advisory and into place at this stage. No,
the water, the water is fine. None is the party line.
In January twelve of two thousand and fifteen, to try
E steps in to offer help, notably their water and
Sewage department says Flint people of Flint financial tycoon or
tyrant of Flint. We will reconnect the water supply and
(20:12):
wave the connection fee, which was four million dollars at
least per the Governor's Office of Detroit. But what happens next?
Remember that emergency manager Jerry Ambrose, Yeah, he said no,
we're good guys. And and he was just talking about
the additional costs that would be involved if they wanted
(20:34):
to take that water from Detroit. And I think they
were looking at around a million dollars a month or
something like that. Um And they're also saying the city
itself doesn't have a connection directly to that Detroit system,
since that that was I guess sold by Flint as
part of some some deal that they were making with
another county right exactly to Genesee County. I believe it's
(20:57):
called so there they are in at this point, I
want to say, I don't want to demonize Ambrose too
much because it's got to be a tough thing. There's
no money. They're asking you to spend straw into gold.
They're asking you to make soup from rocks. And you
should have listened to our alchemy episode. He should have. Yeah,
he should listen to the Alchemy episode. He would have
(21:18):
learned something. That's when the e p A starts talking
about lead. Uh. The e p A and Michigan's Department
of Environmental Quality say, hey, there's a there's a lot
of lead in here. There's an unhealthy amount of lead.
(21:38):
A dangerous amount of lead. And that's in February, a
little more than a year ago. So then in July,
there is an internal memo in the e P a
Vironal Protection Agency that gets leaked, and this memo shows
the high levels of lead in a particular case, one
woman's home, high enough that her son actually got lead poisoning.
(22:03):
And this is according to Michigan Radio dot org um
and the site also said that the memo was leaked
by the a c l U who actually reached out
contacted the person who wrote the memo. At this point,
of course, the party line is still the water is fine.
(22:24):
The water is fine, folks, water is fine. What do
you want it to be gluten free? What do you ask?
Then I think it was the regional EPA manager who
came forward and said, and look, you guys, it's too
it's too early to make any conclusions, especially based on
this one memo. So we're just gonna continue continuing on
(22:44):
right exactly. So then let's go to August of Virginia,
tech researchers launched their own investigation and they find, uh,
they find these elevated levels of lead as well, and
they go public. Then in September of that same year,
the Department of Environmental Quality looked at the research Virginia
was doing and disputed the claims about corrosion and uh
(23:06):
lead poisoning or leaching, at least specifically. And then there's
actually a pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna, a Tisha who is
seeing these elevated levels of lead and children from certain
parts of Flint seeing them double triple uh. And here's
a quote from a very helpful CNN dot com timeline
that we are pulling from a lot of these details.
(23:27):
Uh quote. When my research team and I saw that
it was getting into children, and when we knew the consequences,
that's when I think we began not to sleep. Jeez.
So in October of twenty fifteen, the governor at the
time announces a plan to reconnect Flint to Detroit's water.
Flint's water switches back to Lake Huron. However, by then,
(23:51):
the corrosion, that's that's the issue. So the pipes are
old and the pipes are lead pipes. That was not
as much of a problem when there was a less
corrosive water source, given that the Flint River was so
much more corrosive than Lake huron. What they find is
that they're still going to be elevated levels of lead. So,
(24:11):
in other words, because of the higher corrosiveness of the
water in the more polluted water source, which was the
Flint River, it's causing the lead in the pipes to
actually leach into the water itself to come detached. It
could be the cleanest water ever that flows through it
now and it doesn't matter. You're gonna have some some issues,
(24:31):
yeah exactly. But you know, if you're using this uh,
more polluted water that has different, you know, materials in
it that could that could accelerate this process, that's when
things become pretty dire. At this point, you know, a
lot of the there's really no turning back. I mean,
it's very very difficult to reverse what damage has already
(24:51):
been done. And these Virginia Tech researchers actually continue to
find elevated lead in Flint water, even though they're at
lower levels, but they are it's still much higher than
they should be. The next month, the federal lawsuit is
filed by the residents of Flint, Michigan. They filed the
lawsuit against the governor, the state, UH, the city, and
(25:13):
several other defendants they say that the Department of Environmental
Quality was not, in fact treating flint water with an
anti corrosive agent. That's a violation of federal law. This
means that, as Nolan I point out earlier, the water
was eroding, the iron water mains turning at brown. About
half of the lines to Flint homes are made of lead.
(25:35):
And this this is exactly what happened. That's our that's
our sequence of events. That's what they allege in the lawsuit.
And uh, you know, this doesn't happen all the time
in lawsuits, of course, but it turns out that they
were telling the truth. Uh. The chief of the Department
of Environmental Quality quits December. So these things happen, and
(25:56):
just month after month. Then as we get to sixteen,
the governor reached out for the federal Emergency Management Agencies,
helped FEMA, her good old friends at FEMA, and UM
even of activating the Michigan National Guard to actually help
get water, bottled water to people who were in need.
And to me, the most mind boggling element of all
(26:18):
of this is that there were multiple points along this
process where they could have started to to mitigate some
of these problems, but instead all you see is Nope,
it's all good. We didn't do anything wrong. Everything's fine.
You know, it's all about just defending that initial decision,
that cost cutting decision to change the water source. Because
(26:42):
in politics, you know, somebody wants to get a pat
on the back for saving some money and doing the
right thing politically speaking, not necessarily, you know, for the
people to Flint, and you know, I mean, I'm sure
their hearts were in the right place, but when you
realize you've made a mistake of this magnitude, you got
to come clean. Right, So slate rights. That's our question
(27:04):
for today. What is the stuff they don't watch to know?
What is the cover up? What is the corruption? Is
there any? And the answer is unambiguously yes, yes. Uh.
Michigan new last year that Flint's water might be poisoned,
but decided we'll just keep this on the hush. Let's
just keep this on the down low. You like how
(27:26):
I'm going into my quiet story voice. Yeah, so jumping
around a little bit. But in uh, in January of
two thousand sixteen, when as as you had said, Matt,
when Governor Snyder came clean about the dangerous levels of
lead and flint and called it a state of emergency.
(27:48):
It appears that a study released in September of concluded
that the change put flint children at and I'll quote here,
a significantly increased risk of lead poisoning. Before we go further,
let's talk about why lead poisoning is a big deal.
(28:09):
So lead poisoning, which also has a couple of interesting
names painters, colic and plumbism, like plumber, but plumbism. It's
it's a it's something that happens when you have increased
amounts of lead in your body. Lead interferes with a
lot of the processes that our bodies depend on, and
(28:30):
it can damage your heartbones and testines, kidneys, your reproductive
your nervous system. It's all kinds of bad news. Here's
one of the big things. It's very, very dangerous to
expose children to this. Children of vulnerable because their nervous
systems are still developing. So studies show that it can
cause significant learning disorders that are permanent, as well as
(28:55):
behavioral disorders. In severe cases, it can cause seizures, and
in the worst case, it can cause death. So for
this kind of exposure, what we're hearing is permanent damage
done due to a cover up. Essentially, it seems to show,
also according to the a c l U, that the
(29:16):
Department of Environmental Quality rigged test results in the water
in the summer of after reports about problems had already
been published. They cite the work of the Virginia Tech
folks were mentioned, who were headed by a guy named
Mark Edwards, an engineering professor who studied flint closely. So
according to uh Dr Edwards, the city officials broke federal
(29:39):
laws by failing to collect water samples from homes at
the highest risk, and they also failed to conduct follow
up tests as required on homes that had high levels,
and the d e Q, the Department of Environmental Quality
officials who are supervising this, according to Dr Edwards, made
a move to reject two samples collective by the city.
(30:02):
Samples that as just maybe there is a coincidence, would
have pushed the test results above a level the city
was a prior to alert residents. So it seems that
it seems that management already knew, for lack of a
better word, and cooperated with one another two cover this
(30:23):
up or to delay the release of the news. What
this all means is that um oh, and there's not
an emergency manager now that ended in April. But what
this all means is that this could potentially be a
criminal case. And I wanted to ask you guys, who, yeah,
should someone be prosecuted who? I mean? I would say
(30:47):
it would be the guy that that resigned the d
e Q and the e P a regional aspect. But
it's so tricky because I mean, you have to prove
at what stage they knew, you know, that they were
not acting in good faith, that they were literally acting
outside of the scope of their job and obfuscating you know, facts,
(31:08):
I mean, And that's that's really hard to prove, isn't it.
You know, It's strange because we do function in a
court of public opinions so often nowadays. But for it
to be rule of law, there there has to be
a provable trail, approvable paper trail, audio conversations. I guess
Skype calls if anyone is still foolish enough to conduct
(31:31):
an important conversation on Skype, Sorry Skype, but you know
the deal, I would yeah, because most of the people
who made incorrect decisions here probably had no idea that
what they were doing was going to lead to a
domino effect to where in the end children are getting
lead poisoning, a pretty heavy lead poisoning. Right. They probably
(31:52):
thought they were making small, small level decisions to save money.
If not, cutting corner is a bit right at least,
that's what in my opinion, that's what I'm seeing. And
it's a it's a really difficult situation because we know that,
you know, Flint being one of the most um financially,
(32:13):
you know, distraught areas in Michigan, which as a state
has some real serious problems. I mean Detroit, you know,
declared bankruptcy and they're only just now really starting to
rebuild and pull themselves out of that after all these
worries they were going to have to sell off the
contents of their art museum and you know, things like
that is to stay afloat. And as we know, Flint
has a real history of dealing with these issues ever
(32:36):
since Roger and Me, which was in nine nine, um,
that is when they lost a lot of their manufacturing jobs.
And I'm not sure I have a feeling that some
of that could have come back, but you know, you know,
it's never the same, and we know Flint has been
having these kinds of problems for a long time. And
for you know, to be a member of the government
(32:58):
in a city like this where you're you know, Hamstrong,
with lack of funds, lack of you know, really power,
having to defer to you know, Detroit and say help us.
I mean, it's a very difficult situation to find yourself.
And I do not envy any of those people. And
you know, sometimes you gotta make hard decisions and sometimes
you mess up. But if they we're covering their own
(33:21):
you know, Tucases took us as trying to protect their
own jobs, to pick their own jobs, you know, which
compared to some of the folks that this really affected,
pretty cushy. You know. I'm glad you bring up that point,
because this takes us beyond Flint. This is the this
is the larger stuff they don't want you to know.
(33:41):
For today's episodes. There's an amazing book written called Lead
Wars by authors David Rosner and a guy named Gerald
Marc A. Witz. And in Lead Wars they note that, yes,
Flint's problems are being addressed. It's in the national media now. However,
they're not Flint has highlighted the problems with lead in pipes.
(34:05):
There's a bigger thing. Lead is a neurotoxin, and it
can be found on walls, in the soil, in the air,
and even a small exposure can again impair brain development.
It can cause hyperactivity, dyslexia, a d d i Q loss.
So when we talked about how far back we knew
(34:26):
lead was bad for you, Rosina argues that it goes
back to the nineteen tens, in the nineteen twenties when
doctors were documenting children who had lead on their fingers
as a dust and put their hands in their mouth
and began going into seizures. Don't need a lot of
this stuff. But the average can of paint from the
nineteen nineties to nineteen fifty contained like lead carbonate, which
(34:49):
is so and it's all it's slap dashed all over
the walls of older places. There were advertising things that
said lead as much cleaner than wallpay paper, like how
slick it is use lead. Uh. There was even a
scandal in d C about lead and drinking. And it's
tough for us to predict how far this will go.
(35:13):
We do know that it over like that. It it
tends to affect people in disadvantage communities minorities more than
it affects other parts of the population. I mean, and
there are safeguards in place, like I know, for example,
when I bought my home um several years ago, they
have to disclose you know that because of the age
(35:34):
of the home, that that's possible that lead paint was used,
and then you have to do things to ensure that
there's no lead paint remaining. I mean, you know that's
up to you, I guess, but they let you know that, hey,
there's as possible as lead paint here. It reminds me
of you know, the high school that I went to.
There was a whole period where they realized, oh, there's
a lot of s best us still in this building
(35:55):
and it was a huge deal or they had to
like bring in these crews and pull this stuff out.
But like you said, I mean a lot of these
these folks are renting. You know, maybe their landlords haven't
taken the steps to do some of these things, or
maybe they got around it somehow. What what Rosner Markowitz
said that I recommend highly this interview they did with
(36:16):
MPR and the book itself. They found an active conspiracy
by the lead industry. And I know it might sound
ridiculous for me to say big lead, but that's exactly
what it was. That that was similar to, uh, some
of the stuff the tobacco industry did. When the carcinogenic
effects of cigarettes and dip and all this other stuff
came to light, the lead industry went around the country
(36:39):
saying telling doctors, yeah, having completely proved the lead is
the cause of children going into convulsions and kids dying,
so you need to do some more sophisticated studies. You
need depths, rays, you need like a variety of other
techniques or whatever. But the problem is this led to
(37:01):
a vastly underestimated number of lead poisoning cases, because if
they were not recognized, it looked like maybe that a
high fever or another kind of thing. But what the
lead industry did to take this conflation of symptoms and
use it to their advantage was to say, uh, lead
poisoning was overstated and the doctors were misdiagnosing children. And
(37:24):
now that leads us to a situation we have today
where an infrastructure is in danger and where where if
something unexpected or bad happens, the results can quickly get
out of control. So listeners out there, what do you think,
I mean, what where do you who? Where do you
(37:45):
think that the responsibility falls in situations like these? Um?
Are there any folks out there that are Inflint right now?
I know, Matt you said you have family there. We'd
love to hear from anyone that's experienced the stuff firsthand. Um,
because it is, like you said, ultimately a problem that's
bigger than Flint. But Flint really puts a spotlight on
(38:05):
what can happen when these aged aging infrastructures go. You know,
let our left unrepaired and the continued to deteriorate. Yeah,
or are you in Cleveland and someone in your family
is dealing with lead poisoning from government housing on the
walls there from the lead paint. So let us know.
You can reach us on Twitter where we're at conspiracy
(38:26):
stuff on Facebook where where stuff they don't want you
to know. And if you go to that Facebook page
you can watch us live every once in a while
on Friday's we'll we'll do a live show there. We
also are on Periscope every once in a while. You
can find us through our Twitter accounts and those are
a lot of fun because you can ask questions in
real time, and we have a lot of fun just
kind of like fielding them and we're back and forth,
and it's a really cool way to kind of hang
(38:47):
out with everybody, have special guests every once in a while,
and if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you just want to talk to us, you
can send us a good old fashioned evening. We are
conspiracy at house stuff works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is My name
(00:21):
is Noel. I am. Then you argue and that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. This podcast
has been a long time coming. Why don't we open
up the show with first things? First? Shut up corners. Okay,
it's shout out corner today. We'd like to start out
(00:42):
with a shout out to Tom's sort Aden and everyone
else listening in Norway. Wow. Yes, and uh, we have
a phrase here that I watched a YouTube video on
and how to say it correctly? Um, here we go,
Hi vordin gorda. Hopefully that's at least somewhere at least
one of the three of us pronounced it correctly, and
(01:05):
with our three pronunciation skills combined, maybe it made you
know some kind of sense. I think it's supposed to
be said at least three times faster than that, But
I don't, I don't, I don't know how to do that.
We sounded like a very drunken person trying to speak
Norwegian shout out to you. Tom, Who's next, We've got
Nate Clump and Nate, you're probably working on a bike
(01:28):
right now while you're listening to this, and we can
only hope that this is the easiest fix that you're
gonna have all day and you get a little time
to go do something for yourself. Consider it, you know.
I mean some people they like the long processes so
they can listen to more podcasts. Oh yeah, you're right.
I hope that the current bike that you're working on
is the hardest job you've ever done, so you can
finish this podcast and they end right, they end together,
(01:50):
just perfect, because that is very satisfying. It's like when
you pull up to your house and that NPR story
and you don't have to have that, you know. It's
like when you walk to the microwave and then it
stops right as you get, right as you approach it.
Am I the only person who pretends them diffusing a
bomb at the last second When I stopped a microwave.
(02:11):
I always like to open the door with only a
single second remaining. That's just like a no C D
Thing's and our final shout out for today's shout Out
Corner goes to Marie ferminjured, I hope you're saying that correctly,
and her mom Sabrina, we had a question about this,
right mat Yeah, Marie, we're wondering are you really five
(02:33):
years old? Or is there something you don't want us
or your mom to know. Yes, shout out to you, Marie,
and we hope you enjoy the food that your mom
has prepared for you. We we assume that it is
most nutritious and delicious. And with this we end our
shout Out Corners. And that brings us to today's episode
(02:56):
of We're traveling from the Shout Out Corner across the globe,
taking you with us to the Upper Peninsula or the
lower Peninsula. No, to Michigan, to Michigan just by the
Great Lakes, which is weird because Michigan, if you look
at it as a child, I can see how it
would be very confusing to anyone to say, why is
(03:18):
that one state? Yeah, most of what I know about
Michigan has come from two places. One the wonderful Sufian
Stephen's record Michigan, which is where he grew up. And
if you want to hear a really excellent epic sweeping
orchestral piece of music. That's a good place to start,
and every song has kind of like personifies a different
(03:38):
part of Michigan. That's where I learned about the Upper
Peninsula and all that UM. And then the second place
I learned about it, which is very pertinent to our
topic today, was the movie Roger and Me, which was
Michael Moore's first documentary where he who you know, he
grew up in Michigan Flint as well UM, and he
pursues the then CEO of the General Motors Company, Roger Smith,
(04:00):
to bring him take him to task for UM shutting
down all of the manufacturing facilities in Flint, which was
the heart of that city's economy, and it just, you know,
plummeted the city and its residents into poverty, and a
lot of the issues that we're talking about today likely
began back then in terms of infrastructure and things not
(04:23):
being you know, looked after sure, as the money just
wasn't coming in anymore to the to the counties, into
the city, which is an unfortunate story in a country
where the manufacturing base was being off shore at such
a precipitous rate for a time. Yeah, that you have
family in Michigan. Yeah, I have family the A couple
of them live right outside of Detroit. I think they're
(04:46):
on the northern side of Detroit, but I'm not exactly positive.
And then I've got a whole another section that live
just north of Flint, so basically north and south of Flint,
so roughly twenty miles on one side, forty or so
miles on the other side. So they I spoke to
them this week actually, right before we're recording this, just
to kind of get some idea of what they're seeing,
(05:08):
if anything there, and both said that they haven't seen
really any effects. They didn't even learn about it until
Rachel Maddow talked about it on her show. So how
far how far outside of Flint are they? Twenty miles
north and then I think, I don't know exactly, but
closer to Detroit on the south. It's a different water system, Yeah,
(05:28):
completely different water system, and they don't know a lot
of people personally. One thing that my cousin said is
that Flint is such a place where you don't really
go to Flint if you're not from Flint. It's which
is a kind of a sad thing. Um, but when
you live in that community. You just live in that community.
(05:50):
And if you don't, you don't write not a big
tourist space. You're saying, sure, yeah for anything. Well, one
thing that Flint, Michigan has, unfortunately in common with many
other cities across the US, and this will be a
US centric podcast, one thing that all these cities have
in common is a terrifyingly bad infrastructure situation. For quite
(06:14):
a few people, in the post World War two era,
the United States was seen as the shining beacon of success,
despite of course, the enormous internal problems the country had
with discrimination, prejudice on gender and ethnicity and creed and religion.
The thing was there was it was a booming economy
(06:37):
where someone could have what today would be seen as
maybe a minimum wage job, but still afforda house, maybe
one spouse stays at home, afford to raised kids. And
one other thing that was amazing was this infrastructure. The
fact that unlike so many other countries, you could hop
into the car that you bought probably was still an
(06:59):
ownership society back then, and you could just drive from
one coast to the other and then back right. No
border controls unless you you know, you go to Mexico
or Canada, and there's this huge nation with these great roads,
and that is no longer the case. In recent years,
this thing has, this infrastructure thing has declined dramatically. According
(07:23):
to the American Society of Civil Engineers, people who are
paid just to look at this stuff, one and nine
of the bridges in the US was rated structurally deficient
as and that gave the bridges a score of a
C plus, which is actually one of the better scores
that the United States infrastructure got. Yeah, that's the worst
(07:45):
part relative to other parts of the US infrastructure that's
relatively good. They have a we have a quote from
them that the a s C said at the time, quote,
our infrastructure systems are failing to keep pace with the
current and expanding needs and investment and infrastructure is faltering.
And there are signs of hope. The a s c
s report card that they issued gave a slightly improved
(08:08):
grade to infrastructure overall compared to two thousand and nine.
But that's here's the problem. It's not just a road
or a bridge, you know, it's something that politically is
difficult for to get people to vote for. No one
wants to pay attacks for something like that, until you know,
the hurricane hits and the levies break or the bridge collapses,
(08:31):
and then everyone's looking to point fingers in place blame, right,
why didn't you do this? Why didn't you Why didn't
you make us vote the way you wanted has to vote?
I mean, and it makes sense because it is unpopular
when it comes to getting the job done. No one
wants a lane of of you know, busy intersection closed off.
No one wants to be late to work because there's
(08:52):
you know, work being done on the you know, the
road they drive on. No one wants to you know,
have their street dug up and pipes you know, ripped out,
and you know, and we're moving on, obviously to you
know the big subjective today, which is water systems. And
you know, you got to think about these systems that
were in place, you know, just long, long ago, and
(09:15):
we've had to kind of just keep repairing and patching
and fixing these things little by little, because can you
imagine what it would take to just put up let's
just put a whole new water system into our you know,
metropolitan city, right, especially when we consider how funding arrives
those things, we won't get too, won't get too bogged
down in those details, but just for just for some perspective,
(09:39):
the the Infrastructure report Card that we're mentioning projects that water,
the funding we need to safely restructure the US water
system is gonna total out to a hundred and twenty
six billion. We have forty two billion of that and
these are two thousand ten dollars, so appreciate the inflation there,
(10:02):
and that means that the Uncle SAM is eighty four
billion dollars short. On an unpopular thing. At the dawn
of the twenty one century, most of our drinking much
of our drinking water infrastructure is nearing the end of
its life. These things, because you know, these things are
constantly in an eroding environment. Water is moving all the time.
(10:27):
A lot of this stuff is really old, back before
we understood the safety implications. So we have some good
and bad news. So there's an estimated two forty thousand
water main breaks per year in the U s alone,
assuming that every single pipe would need to be replaced,
the cost over the coming decades could reach more than
(10:47):
a trillion dollars. And that's according to the American water
Works Association, which is crazy, but there's good news. Yeah. Well,
the good news is that in a lot of places
in the US, the sinking water that you're going to
get from a fountain that is meant for human consumption
is pretty high. It's potable. Yeah, overall, it's pretty good stuff.
(11:09):
Even though the pipes and the mains that are running
underneath the city and throughout it are are pretty old,
frequently more than a hundred years old. And when they're
that old, they need replacement, especially depending on what they're
made from. Like there are some older wooden pipes that
still exists. There are some pipes that may or may
not contain a little bit of lead in them. Uh,
(11:29):
there are huge issues with that. And this is because
the water is treated, right, I mean it right, the water.
The water treatment system is one of the biggest parts.
And the good thing about this is that getting sick
from drinking the water is a pretty rare thing in
this country. Right. That's where we're gonna that's That's a
great way to set up this point because for quite
(11:50):
a few people in the US, traveling to another country
is is difficult and it's expensive. You know, they're they're
two oceans on either side, and as a result. Sometimes
in the international community, people who live in this country
are accused of not having an entirely realistic understanding of
(12:12):
how how stuff works, although I hate to say it
that way, in other in other parts of the world.
And with that being said, you know, one one of
the things that I think escapes a lot of people
is just how profoundly important safe water is to any civilization.
You know, there are places around the world where you're
(12:33):
just not gonna drink the water. And it's not it's
not because you are not acclimated to bacteria or whatever
is in there. It's because no one can drink the water.
And this this sort of sanitation is a huge deal,
and we are conscious of that, folks. But we are
also conscious of the increasingly deteriorating system in here in
(12:55):
the US. So we have examples for you. In October
two twelve, her Acane sandy not large coastal sewage plants
offline and caused nearly forty two million cubic meters that's
eleven billion gallons of sewage to go into the water supply. Ah,
what do you do from from you know, can you
(13:17):
imagine being the people tasked to fix that? All right? Guys,
let's pump this out of here. Well, it's water, and
now it's just got sewage in it. Huh. In January,
a storage tank in West Virginia that held the chemical
used in coal production leaked into the Elk River and
it's spilled an estimated forty cubic meters, which is ten
(13:39):
thousand gallons, just upstream of the water intake for Charleston,
the state capital there. Now here's the problem. Almost three
hundred thousand people were without tap water for at least
four days when that happened. Now you have to think
I've been without I think you guys may have gone
through this. Here in Atlanta somewhere, we've been without tap
(14:01):
order for a few days because of some small thing
or a main leak or something like that. It's crazy
how much of a wrench it throws into your world
when you don't have running potable water. Actually, in my
hometown in Augusta, Georgia and North Augusta, which is the
on the border of Georgia and South Carolina, but it's
like right over the bridge, they're really closely on one another.
(14:22):
Um they have been having all these boil advisories lately,
and they haven't quite determined what the problem is, and
they keeps coming up. It's very strange. And I mean
even just think about that, just like adding that step
having to boil your water and then when you got
to cool it again, I guess you can ice it
or would you wait to leave it out and put
it in the fridge. I don't know what. And it
just seems like a whole you know. Or do you
(14:44):
go out and you buy privatized water from someplace in
a in a jug or in and it's not cheap,
so I don't know, it's it's crazy. So one of
the big points that we're obviously making here, folks, is
that while the situation in Flint, Michigan may have been
one of the first to really garner national attention, it's
(15:07):
not really unique. It's not especially exceptional in terms of
uh substandard infrastructure. These kind of these kind of breaks
are happening in in the modern age. This is not
necessarily an isolated incident. And we're going to dive into,
(15:28):
maybe that's a poor choice of words, the situation in Flint, Michigan.
After a word from our sponsor, and we're back. We're
back in Michigan, we're back in Flint, Michigan, specifically where
things started to go wrong in recent months. You have
(15:51):
no doubt heard about the crisis with lead contamination in
the city of Flint, Michigan. We have a little bit
of a timeline that can walk you through here. In
two thousand eleven, Michigan takes over the Flint budget. They
take over the town's budget because there were years of
rampant poverty spurred in part by the loss of auto manufacturing.
(16:15):
Like you mentioned earlier, no Flint is in a financial
state of emergency. Michigan takes over and when they take over,
the governor at the time, Rick Snyder, appoints an emergency
financial manager. And this manager was, according to a congressman
named Dan Kildee, this manager was hired to do one thing.
(16:37):
I'll actually read the quote. You had one job, man,
one job. Simply do one thing and one thing only,
and that's cut the budget at any cost. Yikes. So
one option for a budget cutting thing is to stop
paying Detroit for that Sweet Lake Huron water and start
using water from the Flint River because that's safe, right,
(17:01):
And so they do a study. This is all the
two thousand eleven the study finds that for Flint River
water to be considered drinkable, it would need to be
treated with an anti corrosion agent, and water treatment will
cost the state about a hundred dollars a day. Adding
this treatment, by the way, in retrospect, would have present
(17:21):
prevented of the town's later problems. So these complaints are
mounting over the years. Let's let's fast forward to a
little bit more recently. In two thousand fourteen April, Flint
officials to combat these rumors about just how terrible water
is in Flint, they publicly drink the river water in
(17:42):
front of the media. Yeah, the mayor right right, yes, okay,
So at this point the Mayor's drink the water on television.
Everyone's you know, maybe not everyone, but it looks like
it's gonna be okay. We're gonna switch over to the
Flint River. We're running it through a treatment plant. It's
gonna be okay. So in April, work team that happens. Now,
this is meant to be just a temporary solution, right,
(18:04):
This isn't there. The idea isn't to stay on the
Flint River water forever. I mean, are they trying? How
how are they going to raise the money to pay Detroit. Yeah,
this is just a budget cutting move. If it's a
budget cutting move. So eventually they're going to get the
water from Huron. From Lake Huron, which they're right next to.
I mean it's not right next to it, it's not
far away. So they're thinking maybe two years they can
(18:24):
make a state runs supply line. Problem is that in
comparison to Lake Huron's water, h Virginia Tech researchers find
that Flint River, the Flint River water supply is nineteen
times more corrosive. So then in May is when the discolored,
(18:44):
bad tasting, bad smelling water starts actually making its way
into Flint residents homes via their their faucets. This stuff
is brown, Yeah, this stuff is objectively brown. This stuff
looks like soup and not not you know, not a
good soup, none, a nice biscu or something. And it's
not one of those things where maybe there's a little
(19:05):
junk in the system where you turn on your faucet
if you haven't turned it on in a long time,
and it kind of goes out and then you get
the nice water. You can get a little bit of
rust or something like that, and then it clears out, No,
it's not like that. But not to mention the fact
that the city officials continue telling the residents it's fine, Okay,
it's fine, attention to the soup in the water, go well,
(19:29):
And and then there are there are large swasters of
the population that have to continue using this water because
they cannot afford to have another water source, at least
in some way. Well, there's not another water source. They'd
have to buy bottle That's what I'm saying. So they
don't have they don't have the means to go out
and buy bottled water. So we're talking like not even
(19:50):
a boil advisory and into place at this stage. No,
the water, the water is fine. None is the party line.
In January twelve of two thousand and fifteen, to try
E steps in to offer help, notably their water and
Sewage department says Flint people of Flint financial tycoon or
tyrant of Flint. We will reconnect the water supply and
(20:12):
wave the connection fee, which was four million dollars at
least per the Governor's Office of Detroit. But what happens next?
Remember that emergency manager Jerry Ambrose, Yeah, he said no,
we're good guys. And and he was just talking about
the additional costs that would be involved if they wanted
(20:34):
to take that water from Detroit. And I think they
were looking at around a million dollars a month or
something like that. Um And they're also saying the city
itself doesn't have a connection directly to that Detroit system,
since that that was I guess sold by Flint as
part of some some deal that they were making with
another county right exactly to Genesee County. I believe it's
(20:57):
called so there they are in at this point, I
want to say, I don't want to demonize Ambrose too
much because it's got to be a tough thing. There's
no money. They're asking you to spend straw into gold.
They're asking you to make soup from rocks. And you
should have listened to our alchemy episode. He should have. Yeah,
he should listen to the Alchemy episode. He would have
(21:18):
learned something. That's when the e p A starts talking
about lead. Uh. The e p A and Michigan's Department
of Environmental Quality say, hey, there's a there's a lot
of lead in here. There's an unhealthy amount of lead.
(21:38):
A dangerous amount of lead. And that's in February, a
little more than a year ago. So then in July,
there is an internal memo in the e P a
Vironal Protection Agency that gets leaked, and this memo shows
the high levels of lead in a particular case, one
woman's home, high enough that her son actually got lead poisoning.
(22:03):
And this is according to Michigan Radio dot org um
and the site also said that the memo was leaked
by the a c l U who actually reached out
contacted the person who wrote the memo. At this point,
of course, the party line is still the water is fine.
(22:24):
The water is fine, folks, water is fine. What do
you want it to be gluten free? What do you ask?
Then I think it was the regional EPA manager who
came forward and said, and look, you guys, it's too
it's too early to make any conclusions, especially based on
this one memo. So we're just gonna continue continuing on
(22:44):
right exactly. So then let's go to August of Virginia,
tech researchers launched their own investigation and they find, uh,
they find these elevated levels of lead as well, and
they go public. Then in September of that same year,
the Department of Environmental Quality looked at the research Virginia
was doing and disputed the claims about corrosion and uh
(23:06):
lead poisoning or leaching, at least specifically. And then there's
actually a pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna, a Tisha who is
seeing these elevated levels of lead and children from certain
parts of Flint seeing them double triple uh. And here's
a quote from a very helpful CNN dot com timeline
that we are pulling from a lot of these details.
(23:27):
Uh quote. When my research team and I saw that
it was getting into children, and when we knew the consequences,
that's when I think we began not to sleep. Jeez.
So in October of twenty fifteen, the governor at the
time announces a plan to reconnect Flint to Detroit's water.
Flint's water switches back to Lake Huron. However, by then,
(23:51):
the corrosion, that's that's the issue. So the pipes are
old and the pipes are lead pipes. That was not
as much of a problem when there was a less
corrosive water source, given that the Flint River was so
much more corrosive than Lake huron. What they find is
that they're still going to be elevated levels of lead. So,
(24:11):
in other words, because of the higher corrosiveness of the
water in the more polluted water source, which was the
Flint River, it's causing the lead in the pipes to
actually leach into the water itself to come detached. It
could be the cleanest water ever that flows through it
now and it doesn't matter. You're gonna have some some issues,
(24:31):
yeah exactly. But you know, if you're using this uh,
more polluted water that has different, you know, materials in
it that could that could accelerate this process, that's when
things become pretty dire. At this point, you know, a
lot of the there's really no turning back. I mean,
it's very very difficult to reverse what damage has already
(24:51):
been done. And these Virginia Tech researchers actually continue to
find elevated lead in Flint water, even though they're at
lower levels, but they are it's still much higher than
they should be. The next month, the federal lawsuit is
filed by the residents of Flint, Michigan. They filed the
lawsuit against the governor, the state, UH, the city, and
(25:13):
several other defendants they say that the Department of Environmental
Quality was not, in fact treating flint water with an
anti corrosive agent. That's a violation of federal law. This
means that, as Nolan I point out earlier, the water
was eroding, the iron water mains turning at brown. About
half of the lines to Flint homes are made of lead.
(25:35):
And this this is exactly what happened. That's our that's
our sequence of events. That's what they allege in the lawsuit.
And uh, you know, this doesn't happen all the time
in lawsuits, of course, but it turns out that they
were telling the truth. Uh. The chief of the Department
of Environmental Quality quits December. So these things happen, and
(25:56):
just month after month. Then as we get to sixteen,
the governor reached out for the federal Emergency Management Agencies,
helped FEMA, her good old friends at FEMA, and UM
even of activating the Michigan National Guard to actually help
get water, bottled water to people who were in need.
And to me, the most mind boggling element of all
(26:18):
of this is that there were multiple points along this
process where they could have started to to mitigate some
of these problems, but instead all you see is Nope,
it's all good. We didn't do anything wrong. Everything's fine.
You know, it's all about just defending that initial decision,
that cost cutting decision to change the water source. Because
(26:42):
in politics, you know, somebody wants to get a pat
on the back for saving some money and doing the
right thing politically speaking, not necessarily, you know, for the
people to Flint, and you know, I mean, I'm sure
their hearts were in the right place, but when you
realize you've made a mistake of this magnitude, you got
to come clean. Right, So slate rights. That's our question
(27:04):
for today. What is the stuff they don't watch to know?
What is the cover up? What is the corruption? Is
there any? And the answer is unambiguously yes, yes. Uh.
Michigan new last year that Flint's water might be poisoned,
but decided we'll just keep this on the hush. Let's
just keep this on the down low. You like how
(27:26):
I'm going into my quiet story voice. Yeah, so jumping
around a little bit. But in uh, in January of
two thousand sixteen, when as as you had said, Matt,
when Governor Snyder came clean about the dangerous levels of
lead and flint and called it a state of emergency.
(27:48):
It appears that a study released in September of concluded
that the change put flint children at and I'll quote here,
a significantly increased risk of lead poisoning. Before we go further,
let's talk about why lead poisoning is a big deal.
(28:09):
So lead poisoning, which also has a couple of interesting
names painters, colic and plumbism, like plumber, but plumbism. It's
it's a it's something that happens when you have increased
amounts of lead in your body. Lead interferes with a
lot of the processes that our bodies depend on, and
(28:30):
it can damage your heartbones and testines, kidneys, your reproductive
your nervous system. It's all kinds of bad news. Here's
one of the big things. It's very, very dangerous to
expose children to this. Children of vulnerable because their nervous
systems are still developing. So studies show that it can
cause significant learning disorders that are permanent, as well as
(28:55):
behavioral disorders. In severe cases, it can cause seizures, and
in the worst case, it can cause death. So for
this kind of exposure, what we're hearing is permanent damage
done due to a cover up. Essentially, it seems to show,
also according to the a c l U, that the
(29:16):
Department of Environmental Quality rigged test results in the water
in the summer of after reports about problems had already
been published. They cite the work of the Virginia Tech
folks were mentioned, who were headed by a guy named
Mark Edwards, an engineering professor who studied flint closely. So
according to uh Dr Edwards, the city officials broke federal
(29:39):
laws by failing to collect water samples from homes at
the highest risk, and they also failed to conduct follow
up tests as required on homes that had high levels,
and the d e Q, the Department of Environmental Quality
officials who are supervising this, according to Dr Edwards, made
a move to reject two samples collective by the city.
(30:02):
Samples that as just maybe there is a coincidence, would
have pushed the test results above a level the city
was a prior to alert residents. So it seems that
it seems that management already knew, for lack of a
better word, and cooperated with one another two cover this
(30:23):
up or to delay the release of the news. What
this all means is that um oh, and there's not
an emergency manager now that ended in April. But what
this all means is that this could potentially be a
criminal case. And I wanted to ask you guys, who, yeah,
should someone be prosecuted who? I mean? I would say
(30:47):
it would be the guy that that resigned the d
e Q and the e P a regional aspect. But
it's so tricky because I mean, you have to prove
at what stage they knew, you know, that they were
not acting in good faith, that they were literally acting
outside of the scope of their job and obfuscating you know, facts,
(31:08):
I mean, And that's that's really hard to prove, isn't it.
You know, It's strange because we do function in a
court of public opinions so often nowadays. But for it
to be rule of law, there there has to be
a provable trail, approvable paper trail, audio conversations. I guess
Skype calls if anyone is still foolish enough to conduct
(31:31):
an important conversation on Skype, Sorry Skype, but you know
the deal, I would yeah, because most of the people
who made incorrect decisions here probably had no idea that
what they were doing was going to lead to a
domino effect to where in the end children are getting
lead poisoning, a pretty heavy lead poisoning. Right. They probably
(31:52):
thought they were making small, small level decisions to save money.
If not, cutting corner is a bit right at least,
that's what in my opinion, that's what I'm seeing. And
it's a it's a really difficult situation because we know that,
you know, Flint being one of the most um financially,
(32:13):
you know, distraught areas in Michigan, which as a state
has some real serious problems. I mean Detroit, you know,
declared bankruptcy and they're only just now really starting to
rebuild and pull themselves out of that after all these
worries they were going to have to sell off the
contents of their art museum and you know, things like
that is to stay afloat. And as we know, Flint
has a real history of dealing with these issues ever
(32:36):
since Roger and Me, which was in nine nine, um,
that is when they lost a lot of their manufacturing jobs.
And I'm not sure I have a feeling that some
of that could have come back, but you know, you know,
it's never the same, and we know Flint has been
having these kinds of problems for a long time. And
for you know, to be a member of the government
(32:58):
in a city like this where you're you know, Hamstrong,
with lack of funds, lack of you know, really power,
having to defer to you know, Detroit and say help us.
I mean, it's a very difficult situation to find yourself.
And I do not envy any of those people. And
you know, sometimes you gotta make hard decisions and sometimes
you mess up. But if they we're covering their own
(33:21):
you know, Tucases took us as trying to protect their
own jobs, to pick their own jobs, you know, which
compared to some of the folks that this really affected,
pretty cushy. You know. I'm glad you bring up that point,
because this takes us beyond Flint. This is the this
is the larger stuff they don't want you to know.
(33:41):
For today's episodes. There's an amazing book written called Lead
Wars by authors David Rosner and a guy named Gerald
Marc A. Witz. And in Lead Wars they note that, yes,
Flint's problems are being addressed. It's in the national media now. However,
they're not Flint has highlighted the problems with lead in pipes.
(34:05):
There's a bigger thing. Lead is a neurotoxin, and it
can be found on walls, in the soil, in the air,
and even a small exposure can again impair brain development.
It can cause hyperactivity, dyslexia, a d d i Q loss.
So when we talked about how far back we knew
(34:26):
lead was bad for you, Rosina argues that it goes
back to the nineteen tens, in the nineteen twenties when
doctors were documenting children who had lead on their fingers
as a dust and put their hands in their mouth
and began going into seizures. Don't need a lot of
this stuff. But the average can of paint from the
nineteen nineties to nineteen fifty contained like lead carbonate, which
(34:49):
is so and it's all it's slap dashed all over
the walls of older places. There were advertising things that
said lead as much cleaner than wallpay paper, like how
slick it is use lead. Uh. There was even a
scandal in d C about lead and drinking. And it's
tough for us to predict how far this will go.
(35:13):
We do know that it over like that. It it
tends to affect people in disadvantage communities minorities more than
it affects other parts of the population. I mean, and
there are safeguards in place, like I know, for example,
when I bought my home um several years ago, they
have to disclose you know that because of the age
(35:34):
of the home, that that's possible that lead paint was used,
and then you have to do things to ensure that
there's no lead paint remaining. I mean, you know that's
up to you, I guess, but they let you know that, hey,
there's as possible as lead paint here. It reminds me
of you know, the high school that I went to.
There was a whole period where they realized, oh, there's
a lot of s best us still in this building
(35:55):
and it was a huge deal or they had to
like bring in these crews and pull this stuff out.
But like you said, I mean a lot of these
these folks are renting. You know, maybe their landlords haven't
taken the steps to do some of these things, or
maybe they got around it somehow. What what Rosner Markowitz
said that I recommend highly this interview they did with
(36:16):
MPR and the book itself. They found an active conspiracy
by the lead industry. And I know it might sound
ridiculous for me to say big lead, but that's exactly
what it was. That that was similar to, uh, some
of the stuff the tobacco industry did. When the carcinogenic
effects of cigarettes and dip and all this other stuff
came to light, the lead industry went around the country
(36:39):
saying telling doctors, yeah, having completely proved the lead is
the cause of children going into convulsions and kids dying,
so you need to do some more sophisticated studies. You
need depths, rays, you need like a variety of other
techniques or whatever. But the problem is this led to
(37:01):
a vastly underestimated number of lead poisoning cases, because if
they were not recognized, it looked like maybe that a
high fever or another kind of thing. But what the
lead industry did to take this conflation of symptoms and
use it to their advantage was to say, uh, lead
poisoning was overstated and the doctors were misdiagnosing children. And
(37:24):
now that leads us to a situation we have today
where an infrastructure is in danger and where where if
something unexpected or bad happens, the results can quickly get
out of control. So listeners out there, what do you think,
I mean, what where do you who? Where do you
(37:45):
think that the responsibility falls in situations like these? Um?
Are there any folks out there that are Inflint right now?
I know, Matt you said you have family there. We'd
love to hear from anyone that's experienced the stuff firsthand. Um,
because it is, like you said, ultimately a problem that's
bigger than Flint. But Flint really puts a spotlight on
(38:05):
what can happen when these aged aging infrastructures go. You know,
let our left unrepaired and the continued to deteriorate. Yeah,
or are you in Cleveland and someone in your family
is dealing with lead poisoning from government housing on the
walls there from the lead paint. So let us know.
You can reach us on Twitter where we're at conspiracy
(38:26):
stuff on Facebook where where stuff they don't want you
to know. And if you go to that Facebook page
you can watch us live every once in a while
on Friday's we'll we'll do a live show there. We
also are on Periscope every once in a while. You
can find us through our Twitter accounts and those are
a lot of fun because you can ask questions in
real time, and we have a lot of fun just
kind of like fielding them and we're back and forth,
and it's a really cool way to kind of hang
(38:47):
out with everybody, have special guests every once in a while,
and if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you just want to talk to us, you
can send us a good old fashioned evening. We are
conspiracy at house stuff works dot com.
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