CLASSIC: Beyond Flint: The Looming Lead Crisis

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.

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So every so often on this show we run into
things that we think are fun or fun thought experiments,
that would be stuff like flat Earth or flat Earth updates.
But we also run into things that are very real conspiracies,
that are very much cover ups, and that have incredibly
dangerous consequences for thousands or even millions of venison people.

(00:23):
Today's classic episode is about just such an example. Flint, Michigan,
like you have a few years back, led us into
an investigation on something that even that continues even today.
It's lead, something as simple as lead, lead in the water,
lead poisoning all over the place. And as you said,

(00:44):
been six years have passed since we recorded this episode.
There are numerous updates all kinds of different infrastructure changes
that have been happening in the city of Flint, Michigan.
There's a lot more to the story, but this is
what was happening almost exactly six years ago from UFOs two.
Psychic Powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events.

(01:06):
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 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.

(01:30):
Why don't we open up the show with first things first?
Shut ut corner. Okay, it's shout out corner today. We'd
like to start out with a shout out to Tom's
sort Agin and everyone else listening in Norway. Wow. Yes,
and uh, we have a phrase here that I watched

(01:51):
a YouTube video on how to say it correctly. Um,
here we go, hi vordin garda. Hope that's at least
somewhere at least one of the three of us pronounced
it correctly, and with our three pronunciation skills combined, maybe
it made you know some kind of sense. I think

(02:11):
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 it. 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 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

(02:33):
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, just perfect, because that is very satisfying. It's
like when you pull up to your house and that

(02:53):
NPR story and you don't have to have that, you know.
It's like when you walked of 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 stop a microwave,
I always like to open the door with only a
single second remaining. That's just like an O C D thing.

(03:15):
It's use 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 man. Yeah, Marie, we're wondering are you
really five years old? Or is there something you don't

(03:36):
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 Corner. Gosh, And that brings
us to today's episode. We were traveling from the Shout

(03:57):
Out Corner across the globe to 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 that one state? Yeah, most

(04:19):
of what I know about Michigan has come from two places. One,
the wonderful Sufian Stephens 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
part of Michigan. That's where I learned about the Upper
Peninsula and all that um. And then the second place

(04:42):
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 you
grew up in Michigan Flint as well Um, and he
pursues the then CEO of the General Motors Company, Roger Smith,
to bring him take him to task for UM shutting

(05:03):
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
being you know, looked after, sure, as the money just

(05:25):
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
on the northern side of Detroit, but I'm not exactly positive.

(05:49):
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 and 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,
if anything there, and both said that they haven't seen

(06:12):
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,
completely different water system. And they don't know a lot
of people personally. One thing that my cousin said is

(06:35):
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,
and if you don't, you don't write not a big
tourist space. You're saying, sure, yeah for anything. Well, one

(06:56):
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 terrifyingly bad infrastructure situation. For quite a
few people. In the post World War two era, the

(07:17):
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
where someone could have what today would be seen as

(07:40):
maybe a minimum wage job, as 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
ownership society back then, and you could just drive from

(08:02):
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

(08:23):
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 A 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

(08:44):
worst part relative to other parts of the U s
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. Infrastructu
sure is faltering, and there are signs of hope. The
a s c S report card that they issued gave

(09:06):
a slightly improved 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

(09:28):
or the bridge collapses, 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

(09:50):
to be late to work because there's 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,

(10:12):
you know, just long long ago, and we've had to
kind of just keep preparing 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.

(10:33):
But just for just for some perspective, 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.

(10:55):
We have forty two billion of that and these are
two thousand ten dollars, so appreciate the inflation there, 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.

(11:19):
These things, because you know, these things are constantly in
an eroding environment. Water is moving all the time. A
lot of 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 US alone, assuming that every single

(11:41):
pipe would need to be replaced, the cost over the
coming decades could reach more than 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
drinking water that you're going to get from a fountain

(12:01):
that is meant for human consumption is pretty high. Yeah. Overall,
it's pretty good stuff. 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

(12:22):
wooden pipes that still exists. There are some pipes that
may or may not contain a little bit of lead
in them. Uh, there are huge issues with that. And
this is because the water is treated, right, I mean 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

(12:43):
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 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

(13:05):
country are accused of not having an entirely realistic understanding
of 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.

(13:29):
You know, there are places around the world where you're
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

(13:50):
also conscious of the increasingly deteriorating system in here in
the US. So we have examples for you. In October
two twelve, Hurricane sand 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,

(14:13):
what do you do from from you know, can you
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

(14:35):
it's billed an estimated forty cubic meters, which is ten
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

(14:55):
I've been without I think you guys may have gone
through this. Here in Atlanta somewhere, we've been without tap
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

(15:16):
on the border of Georgia and South Carolina, but it's
like right over the bridge, they're really closely on one another.
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 gotta

(15:36):
cool it again, I guess you 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, you 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

(16:01):
in Flint, Michigan may have been one of the first
to really garner national attention, it's not really unique. It's
not especially exceptional in terms of substandard infrastructure. These kind
of these kind of breaks are happening in in the
modern age. This is not necessarily an isolated incident. And

(16:25):
we're going to dive into, 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

(16:48):
go wrong in recent months. You have no doubt heard
about the crisis with lead contamination in the city of Flint, Michigan.
We have a little bit of a timeline that we
can walk you through here. In two thousand eleven, Michigan
takes over the Flint budget. They take over the town's

(17:09):
budget because there were years of rampant poverty spurred in
part by the loss of auto manufacturing. 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

(17:30):
this manager was, according to a congressman named Dan Kildee,
this manager was hired to do one thing. 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

(17:51):
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, 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

(18:15):
about a hundred dollars a day. Adding this treatment, by
the way, in retrospect, would have present 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

(18:38):
rumors about just how terrible water is in Flint, they
publicly drink the river water in 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

(19:00):
in April, that happens. Now, this is meant to be
just a temporary solution, right, 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

(19:21):
not right next to it, it's not far away. So
they're thinking maybe two years they can 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, bad tasting,

(19:46):
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 junk in the

(20:07):
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,
no attention to the soup in the water. Go well,

(20:30):
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

(20:51):
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, if Team Detroit 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 wave the connection fee,

(21:15):
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 cost
that would be involved if they wanted to take that

(21:36):
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 called. So there

(22:00):
they are. And 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. There 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 learned something.
That's when the e p A starts talking about lead. Uh.

(22:26):
The e p A and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality say, hey,
there's a there's a lot of lead in here. There's
an unhealthy amount of lead, 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

(22:50):
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. 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

(23:12):
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. 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

(23:32):
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 right exactly. So then
let's go to August, Virginia tech researchers launched their own
investigation and they find uh, they find these elevated levels

(23:56):
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 blood poisoning or leaching, at
least specifically. And then there's actually a pediatrician, Dr Monahana
A Tisha, who is seeing these elevated levels of lead

(24:17):
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. 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. So in October of the governor at the

(24:51):
time announces a plan to reconnect Flint to Detroit's water.
Flint's water switches back to Lake Huron. However, by then,
the corrosion, that's that's the issues. 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

(25:13):
much more corrosive than Lake Huron. What they find is
that there's still going to be elevated levels of lead. So,
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

(25:35):
could be the cleanest water ever that flows through it
now and it doesn't matter. You're gonna have some some issues, 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

(25:55):
the there's really no turning back. I mean, it's very
very difficult to reverse. Damage has already 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 still much higher than they should be. The
next month, the federal lawsuit is filed by the residents

(26:16):
of Flint, Michigan. They filed the lawsuit against the governor,
the state, uh the city, and 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

(26:38):
water mains turning at brown. About half of the lines
to Flint homes are made of lead, 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.

(26:59):
The chief of the Department of Environmental Quality quits December,
so these things happened in just month after month. Yeah. Yeah.
Then as we get into sixteen, the governor reached out
for the Federal Emergency Management Agencies helped FEMA. Are good
old friends at FEMA, and um you activating the Michigan
National Guard actually help get water bottled water to people

(27:23):
who were in need. And to me, the most mind
boggling element of all 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

(27:44):
defending that initial decision, that cost cutting decision to change
the water source, because in politics, you know, somebody wants
to get a pat on the back for saving some
money and doing the right thing politically speak. Came not necessarily,
you know, for the people of Flint, and you know,
I mean, I'm sure their hearts were in the right place.

(28:05):
But when you realize you've made a mistake of this magnitude,
you gotta come clean, right, So slate rights, That's our
question 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,

(28:30):
but decided we'll just keep this on the hush. Let's
just keep this on the down low. You like how
I'm going into my quiet story voice. Yeah, so jumping
around a little bit. But in uh, in January of
two thousand and sixteen, when as as you had said, Matt,
when Governor Snyder came clean about the dangerous levels of

(28:52):
lead and flint and called it a state of emergency.
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

(29:12):
go further, let's talk about why lead poisoning is a
big deal. So, lead poisoning, which also has a couple
of interesting names painters, colic and plumbism, like plumber but
plumbs muh. It's it's a it's something that happens when
you have increased amounts of lead in your body. Lead

(29:35):
interferes with a lot of the processes that our bodies
depend on, and 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

(29:55):
nervous systems are still developing. So studies show that it
can cause significan again, learning disorders that are permanent, as
well as 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

(30:16):
damage done due to a cover up. Essentially, it seems
to show also, according to the a c l U
that the 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

(30:38):
guy named Mark Edwards, an engineering professor who studied Flint closely.
So according to uh Dr Edwards, the city officials broke
federal 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 Environmental Quality officials

(31:02):
who are supervising this, according to Dr Edwards, made a
move to reject two samples collected by the city, 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

(31:24):
seems that management already knew for lack of a better word,
and cooperated with one another two cover this 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

(31:46):
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 it
would be the guy that that resigned the e Q
and the e P A regional adema. But it's so
tricky because I mean, you have to prove at what
stage they knew, you know, that they were not acting

(32:08):
in good faith, that they were literally acting outside of
the scope of their job and obfuscating you know, facts,
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

(32:30):
a provable trail, approvable paper trail, audio conversations. I guess
Skype calls if anyone is still foolish enough to conduct
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

(32:53):
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 poison, right. They probably
thought they were making small, small level decisions to save money,
if not cutting corners a bit, right at least, that's
what in my opinion, that's what I'm seeing, And it's

(33:13):
a it's a really difficult situation because we know that,
you know, Flint being one of the most um financially,
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

(33:35):
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
since Roger and Me, which was in nine um, that
is when they lost a lot of their manufacturing jobs.
And I'm not sure I have a feeling that some

(33:55):
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
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,

(34:18):
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
you know, this is 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,

(34:40):
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.
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 read Wars, they note that, yes,

(35:03):
Flint's problems are being addressed. It's in the national media now. However,
whether or not Flint has highlighted the problems with lead
in pipes, 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

(35:24):
impair brain development. It can cause hyperactivity, dyslexia, a d
d i Q loss. So when we talked about how
far back we knew 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

(35:45):
hands in their mouth and began going into seizures. You
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 is so and it's all
it's slap dashed all over. Uh, the walls of older places.
There were advertising things that said lead as much cleaner

(36:08):
than wallpaper, 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. We do know that it over
like that it it tends to affect people in disadvantaged

(36:29):
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 of the home, that that's possible that lead paint
was used. And then you have to do things to

(36:49):
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 period where they realized, oh,
there's a lot of as bestuff still in this building,
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

(37:10):
these folks are renting. You know, maybe their landlords haven't
taken the steps to do some of things, or maybe
they got around it somehow. What what Rosner Markowitz said
that I recommend highly this interview they did with MPR
and the book itself, they found an active conspiracy by

(37:30):
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 saying
telling doctors, yeah, having completely proved the lead was the

(37:53):
cause of children going into convulsions and kids dying. So
you need to do some more souphistic degated studies. You
need depths, rays, you need like a variety of other
techniques or whatever. But the problem is this led to
a vastly underestimated number of lead poisoning cases because if

(38:16):
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 lead poisoning
was overstated and the doctors were misdiagnosing children. And now
that leads us to a situation we have today where

(38:37):
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
think that the responsibility falls in situations like these? Are

(38:59):
there any folks out there that are in Flint right now?
I know, Matt you said you have family there. We'd
love to hear from anyone that's experienced this stuff firsthand. Um,
because it is like you said, ultimately a problem that's
bigger than Flint. But Flint really puts a spotlight on
what can happen when these aged aging infrastructures go. You know,

(39:20):
let our left unrepaired and the continued to deterior rate. 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. And that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with

(39:40):
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(40:02):
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