The Facts About Lead Exposure and Its Irreversible Damage
John Thrasher, the president of Florida State, congratulated quarterback Jameis Winston after the Seminoles won the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game in 2014. Credit Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
John Thrasher, the president of Florida State University, is a former politician who once was chairman of the Rules Committee in the Florida Senate and served a stint as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. He knows how to spin, and how to play hardball. He proved it this week when he issued an astonishingly disingenuous and meanspirited statement after settling a Title IX lawsuit brought by a student who accused Jameis Winston, the former star quarterback of the Seminoles who won the Heisman Trophy in 2013, of raping her in 2012.
The settlement calls for the university to pay the student, Erica Kinsman, $950,000, and to continue, for at least five years, a series of steps aimed at preventing sexual abuse on campus, steps that were initiated after her allegations became public in November 2013 — and after the publication of a detailed article five months later by Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times.
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Flint Weighs Scope of Harm to Children Caused by Lead in Water
FLINT, Mich. — Quayana Towns’s 2-month-old daughter wriggled on an exam table last week as her pediatrician ticked off questions that have become essential for every parent of young children here.
“So what are you guys doing for water — what are you drinking?” asked the doctor, Mona Hanna-Attisha.
“I have a whole bunch of bottled water that I picked up,” said Ms. Towns, 26, assuring the doctor that the family had been drinking it for a few months, since the gravity of Flint’s water crisis came to light.
“And before that you were using tap water?”
“Yes,” Ms. Towns replied, as her other child, a 1-year-old, King, toddled around.
Dr. Hanna-Attisha would waste no time adding King and his sister, Taeyana, to a new database of children under 6 who may have been exposed to lead in Flint’s water, a group she said she believed could number 8,000.
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Related Coverage
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Events That Led to Flint’s Water Crisis
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Months after warning signs emerged about problems with the water in Flint, Mich., city, state and federal officials are responding to the public health emergency. High levels of lead had leached from pipes into the water supply.
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April 25, 2014
The city switches its water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River. The switch was made as a cost-saving measure for the struggling, majority-black city. Soon after, residents begin to complain about the water’s color, taste and odor, and to report rashes and concerns about bacteria.
“Flint water is safe to drink.”
News release from Flint city government
August and September 2014
City officials issue boil-water advisories after coliform bacteria are detected in tap water.
October 2014
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality blames cold weather, aging pipes and a population decline.
“The city has taken operational steps to limit the potential for a boil-water advisory to re-occur.”
Stephen Busch, a district supervisor for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality
October 2014
A General Motors plant in Flint stops using municipal water, saying it corrodes car parts.
January 2015
Detroit’s water system offers to reconnect to Flint, waiving a $4 million connection fee. Three weeks later, Flint’s state-appointed emergency manager, Jerry Ambrose, declines the offer.
February 2015
In a memo for the governor, officials play down problems and say that the water is not an imminent “threat to public health.”“It’s clear the nature of the threat was communicated poorly. It’s also clear that folks in Flint are concerned about other aspects of their water — taste, smell and color being among the top complaints.”
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Michigan Gave State Employees Purified Water as It Denied Crisis, Emails Show
Throughout most of 2015, the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder told the residents of Flint, Mich., that their tap water was safe to drink. But emails released on Thursday suggest the state was concerned about its own employees’ exposure to the city’s water as early as January of last year, even arranging for purified water to be provided at a state office building there.
The emails depict an exchange that month between employees of two state departments that expresses concern about the water’s safety within the Michigan government long before Mr. Snyder acknowledged to residents in the fall that there was a problem.
The correspondence — between employees of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget — was obtained by a liberal advocacy group, Progress Michigan. The news was reported on Thursday by The Detroit Free Press.
When the Water Turned Brown
FLINT, Mich. — Standing at a microphone in September holding up a baby bottle, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local pediatrician, said she was deeply worried about the water. The number of Flint children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had risen alarmingly since the city changed its water supply the previous year, her analysis showed.
Within hours of Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s news conference, Michigan state officials pushed back — hard. A Department of Health and Human Services official said that the state had not seen similar results and that it was working with a much larger set of data. A Department of Environmental Quality official was quoted as saying the pediatrician’s remarks were “unfortunate,” described the mood over Flint’s water as “near-hysteria” and said, as the authorities had insisted for months, that the water met state and federal standards.
Michigan Governor Says Race Had No Role in Flint Water Response
The governor of Michigan said on Friday that race was not a factor in the state’s response to lead contamination in the drinking water in Flint, a poor, majority-black city where the supply has been tainted for more than a year, but for much of that time, state officials insisted that it was safe to drink.
Later in the day, Gov. Rick Snyder suspended two environmental regulators over their roles in the crisis.
Mr. Snyder was asked Friday morning on MSNBC whether Flint residents were victims of “environmental racism,” and he replied, “Absolutely not.”
“Flint is a place I’ve been devoted to helping,” said Mr. Snyder, a Republican. “Look at all the work we’ve done in Detroit. Several cities — Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Saginaw — I’ve made a focused effort since before I started in office to say, ‘We need to work hard to help people that have the greatest need.’ ”
Few Answers on When Flint Will Have Clean Water Again
FLINT, Mich. — More than three months after officials declared that Flint residents should not drink the lead-tainted water from their taps, people who live here are still lugging bottled water from a Walmart or firehouse back to their homes, where they use it to drink, prepare food, brush their teeth and bathe their children.
When that might change remains an open question, one that was not answered at a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday.
Gov. Rick Snyder, whom many residents have blamed for the problem and the delayed response, told reporters that he was actively engaged in resolving the crisis, though he declined to say when residents could begin to drink the water without relying on filters to trap lead.
He also did not say when lead service lines in the Flint system would be replaced, a step that many residents say is necessary for them to begin to regain confidence that the water is drinkable.
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