Flint’s Children Suffer in Class After Years of Drinking the Lead-Poisoned Water

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/politics/flint-michigan-schools.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

290 123 7 years ago

nytimes.com

MarcScott• 7 years ago

In a few years time, I expect we'll see a significant increase in the crime statistics in Flint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

derek18005• 7 years ago

You do realize flint is one of the worst cities in all US for crime. I am not sure it is possible to get worse from where it is now.

sokoloff7• 7 years ago

Why wouldn’t it be possible to get worse? The murder rate of 19 per 50K is still fairly low in overall terms and could dramatically increase without triggering any “natural limit”.

Combine that with the adverse selection of population, it could get quite a bit more dire. If you had significant resources and flexibility, you’ve probably already moved your family out of Flint. As things get worse, people with “any” rather than “significant” resources/flexibility will move out. As you remove swaths of population who (for whatever reason) tend to commit less violent crime, your remaining violent crime rate gets worse.

bluedino• 7 years ago

The crime rate in Flint is actually much, much lower than it was in the early 1990's. Especially the amount of murders.

However, much of the crime isn't reported any more, or acted on. Flint has a ratio of almost 1 police officer per 1,000 residents, with is a quarter of a city like nearby Detroit.

Without cops to record the crime, much less act upon it, the numbers are artificially deflated. Someone could break into your home and since the cops don't come by for 6 hours t oinvestigate it just gets forgotten about.

matheusmoreira• 7 years ago

One of the references cited:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689675/

Childhood lead exposure is associated with region-specific reductions in adult gray matter volume.
Affected regions include the portions of the prefrontal cortex and ACC responsible for executive functions, mood regulation, and decision-making.
These neuroanatomical findings were more pronounced for males, suggesting that lead-related atrophic changes have a disparate impact across sexes.

jacobwilliamroy3• 7 years ago

I hear a lot about Flint's children but what about the adults? The lack of reporting on the adult population is really freaking me out. Like, I want to know if people with power, or people providing vital civil services have lead poisoning. I am really concerned that the police and teachers and postal workers and city council and parents etc. might all be mentally impaired. I imagine the Mayor of Flint with lead poisoning and I just hear a voice in back of my head quietly whispering "Caligula. Caligula."

empath75• 7 years ago

I don’t think lead has as much of an impact on fully formed brains.

derek18005• 7 years ago

But how long has led existed in the pipes? People now grown up could have been impacted when young.

jacobwilliamroy3• 7 years ago

So I found an NIEH article which says chronic exposure in adults can lead to memory and concentration problems:

https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/lead/index.cf...

The city leaded the water supply in april 2014, and the wikipedia timeline says that no one was reporting the elevated lead until february 2015. Even then, the city denied that there was even a lead problem all the way up through september 2015.

Do any medical professions know what "chronic" means in this context? Would 17 months be chronic for someone who was cooking and showering and drinking leaded water?

jgoewert• 7 years ago

The workers for the Standard Oil Company's TEL building would like to have a word with you.

Admittedly, they did have a way higher exposure than anyone else, but we definitely were spewing enough into the atmosphere to affect everyone.

ianai10• 7 years ago

There’s a lack of reporting on Flint, period. For whatever reason, lead and water contamination stories don’t stick in the news cycle. People just aren’t as concerned about it.

This is of course horrible. They’re not the only municipality with lead in its water. But people spend a lot more time and money on the painful wart on their neck than the removed plight of others.

sokoloff7• 7 years ago

That actually seems fairly reasonable to me. If there's something causing daily pain to me or someone in my family, I'm much more likely to spend time, attention, and money on that than on something that is another city's responsibility and is not affecting me directly.

This is a natural and beneficial form of decentralization. I don't expect you to be concerned that my grandmother broke her hip. It's properly a big deal to my family, but not even a blip for yours. I want daily/several times per week updates on her progress; you don't.

We all have a finite amount of time, attention, and money, and while I probably know more about the origin of the Flint water situation than the average American (owing to the latter being near zero rather than deep expertise on my part), I'll be honest that I'm more worried about the water quality in Cambridge, MA and in the schools my kids attend.

There are millions of unfortunate or even tragic events unfolding in the world in any given week. It's unreasonable to assume that everyone should care about all of them or judge the situation to be "of course horrible" when we don't. We'd get nothing done as a society if we stopped to mourn every tragedy everywhere or to get weekly updates on years-long remediation efforts.

I sincerely hope that the city of Flint is able to address the entirely city-inflicted (though funding related) water quality issues for its residents. If they aren't able to do it alone, I hope they ask for and get help from the encompassing county, state, or feds.

At the same time, I conclude that there's nothing with a productive return-on-time that I should be doing, because people who are far more informed, more educated on water treatment specifics, have devoted >100 times the amount of time as I have to understanding the issue, and are in a position (spatially and with authority) to make productive decisions are working on the problem.

zaroth2• 7 years ago

Probably 90% of the country know the story of Flint’s lead contaminated water. It absolutely dominated the news cycle for weeks, and continues to make waves. It must be the most highly reported incident of lead contaminated water in history.

wang_li• 7 years ago

There’s a lack of reporting on Flint, period.

There's no reason to continue reporting on Flint as the water there has met EPA standards for lead for two years now.

https://eng.vt.edu/media-center/articles/2017/flint-water-me...

CalRobert2• 7 years ago

Sometimes it's remarkable to think almost everyone (certainly city-dwellers, at least) in their mid-50's and older grew up with low-level lead poisoning from exhaust.

83457• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

mumblemumble3• 7 years ago

I guess. . . as a city-dweller, it's still a daily thing for me. All that lead settled on the ground, and it's still there. So I need to be much more careful about letting my kids play in the dirt in our backyard than I do when we're visiting friends in the country. Some studies have suggested it's a bigger source of exposure in kids than lead-based paint or contaminated water.

It's also one of the main reasons why the CDC recommends that everyone take off their shoes when they enter the house.

dfxm12• 7 years ago

Like, I want to know if people with power, or people providing vital civil services have lead poisoning.

What do you mean by power? The people, even the adults, of Flint have no power. This is how they ended up with poor water in the first place.

jacobwilliamroy3• 7 years ago

responsibility is the word I should have used.

opencl• 7 years ago

Basically all adults in the US that grew up prior to the leaded gasoline ban have some degree of lead poisoning.

mumblemumble3• 7 years ago

The adults who are running Flint are probably more lead poisoned than the kids. Not because of Flint's drinking water, but because they grew up in the 70s and earlier.

In 1976, the median amount of lead in the blood of young children was 15 µg/dL. This was considered normal and healthy at the time. In the Flint crisis, the kids who were exposed to lead were generally testing between 5 and 10 µg/dL.

source: https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/22/flint-children-lead-expo...

mumblemumble3• 7 years ago

Also, just to pile it on: levels of up to 10 µg/dL weren't considered a problem according to US guidelines until 2012.

This is not by way of meaning to be blasé about the situation. More to highlight that even the country's highest authorities on the subject were enough laxer about it until recently enough that you really do need to be on guard about it for yourself. A 7-year-old CDC guideline will almost certainly have trickled down to your pediatrician's practices, but it probably hasn't had enough time to have much impact on your local building codes or any other local government policies. 8 short years ago, what happened in Flint would not have been considered a problem.

Causality12• 7 years ago

I found it interesting that the article blames the behavior of these children on exposure to lead but contains no information about how much lead they were exposed to or how much lead was found in their blood, especially in the individual cases held up as examples. Of course the people responsible for the Flint Water Crisis deserve to be in prison, but if you claim that one year of lead exposure can lead to multiple suspensions and 70 unexcused absences, I want to know how much lead that is.

sjg0072• 7 years ago

It’s any detectable amount basically.

ianai10• 7 years ago

Specifics are in the Wikipedia entry for the Flint water crisis.

Of note, lead levels aren’t a constant. The lead is a result of deterioration of lead soldering in the pipes by water over time. It’s an unknowable process for when and what lead will break off into the water. People ingested very high levels of lead - that is safe to conclude.

Causality12• 7 years ago

But was there any detectable amount in their blood? It's probable but you can't just handwave those extreme behaviors without bothering to check.

derek18005• 7 years ago

The city of Flint has extremely high poverty and the schools were very bad well before the water issue came to light. I wonder how much of this is due to the lead in water vs just the situation of the city, high poverty, and poor schools, etc. anecdotally I don’t think the things mentioned in this article are all that different from other cities in similar situations without the lead in water issue.

Either case hopefully they can turn things around for the kids who have to grow up in this situation.

ivanhoe2• 7 years ago

Probably all of the factors you mention are important, but lead certainly didn't help. The main reason to mention lead specifically is the horrible way the situation with water pollution was handled by pretty much everyone, from city officials to Obama himself with his completely disrespectful "take a picture of me pretending to drink the Flint water" media stunt.

sokoloff7• 7 years ago

I agree that's disrespectful if the water he was drinking was not actually Flint water, so I went looking. It appears that what he drank (an admittedly small amount of) was actually filtered Flint water (and he identified it as such).

I fail to see the disrespect or anything else untoward about his actions there.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-drinks-filtered-ci...

that_jojo• 7 years ago

I'm from the Flint mtro, currently working ~50 minutes away from Flint, my mother lives in Flint across the street from Mott.

I have literally never heard a single person from the area say anything but neutral to positive things about Obama's visit.

And the filtered water in most places has been EPA-compliant for a long-ass time.

gman83• 7 years ago

Yeah the problem was entirely with Obama and the city officials, never mind the fact that Governor Rick Snyder had put the city under emergency management with his appointees deciding everything.

everdrive2• 7 years ago

There's almost certainly quite a bit of lead in the buildings too.

bdamm• 7 years ago

There's lead in paint all over America, just dripping off old buildings into the soil in some places. And asbestos in insulation and other building products. So?

JackRabbitSlim• 7 years ago

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15305761

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17451672

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20390814

This is why specifically lead is highlighted.

Just more of the extremely high cost of being poor.

gmanley• 7 years ago

I’m guessing OP was aware of this but was more questioning whether we know this was because of lead exposure or just the fact the school system isn’t good. It seems it would be hard to separate the two. Like was said: there are plenty of cities with similar results but without the lead exposure. The lead could definitely be a contributing factor, it’s just hard to know.

bsanr25• 7 years ago

Many of the comparable cases will involve cities that also had lead poisoning issues.

Aunche• 7 years ago

Many towns in Canada have even higher concentrations of lead in their water than Flint. How are their schools doing compared to Flint?

https://apnews.com/24628f49af1e45219ee4b06c0a9a1229

tzs• 7 years ago

I remember reading a very interesting article about a case that showed lead could be a major factor in poor school performance. The article was in a newspaper or news magazine in the '80s or early '90s, and I've not been able to remember enough details to find anything online about it.

Anyway, it was about a school district that had given IQ tests to all the kids. The black kids on average scored significantly lower than the white kids. This could not be explained by the white kids going to better or richer schools, because this district was well integrated. Black kids and white kids that had been together in the same classrooms for their entire school history showed the same IQ gap.

The district concluded that the test was biased and was going to ignore it. One teacher decided to look deeper, and started looking to see if he could find some other factor besides race that was significantly different between the black and white kids.

He realized that all the white kids lived in relatively new housing, and all that black kids lived in much older housing. The black kids' houses were all built long before lead paint was banned. The white kids' house all came after that ban.

They arranged to test the kids for lead, and to test their houses, and they found that most of the black kids were suffering from lead exposure. None of the white kids were.

The lead paint was removed from the black kids' houses, and the kids were treated for lead poisoning.

A couple years later, when the district gave another IQ test, most of the gap between the black and white students was done.

pietrovismara• 7 years ago

There's a great video[0] on contrapoints' YouTube channel where she talks about racism in Baltimore and US and covers exactly this topic.

[0] https://youtu.be/8r6GBo_7UNc

Symmetry• 7 years ago

There was a nice natural experiment that happened a while ago where children with sufficiently high blood lead concentrations had the government perform lead abatements in their homes. And then see how much better the kids with the newly lead free homes do compared to the kids who were just a little too low lead to get these abatements but who were otherwise very similar.

metabagel• 7 years ago

Sewage sludge testing doesn’t support that lead levels were high enough for long enough to cause significant harm to children in Flint, Michigan. It’s understandable that parents would be concerned and tend to overreact, though.

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/05/a-brand-new-l...

openasocket3• 7 years ago

The study that article links to doesn't make any assertion about the harm on children. The author of the mother jones article doesn't seem to cite a source for his claim that it probably didn't significantly harm children. According to the CDC and EPA, there is no known safe level of lead in drinking water, and based on the blood levels that study mentioned children were definitely exposed to lead. Also keep in mind that the way lead leeching works means lead levels in water will fluctuate and can spike to very high levels, so you will see a large variance in how much lead different children were exposed to.

MisterTea• 7 years ago

It’s understandable that parents would be concerned and tend to overreact, though.

If you were living in flint at time time and were aware of the lead contamination, would you or your family consume the water?

romaaeterna2• 7 years ago

Given the available ppb information, I have a hard time telling if Flint had a lead crisis at all. Virginia Tech found that in 10% of homes they hit 25ppb instead of 15ppb standard. And one home had 13,200ppb (which is either testing error, or something special about the house).

Outside of the one house, this isn't enough lead exposure to see effects from.

EDIT: See thread below. Apparently it was not "Virginia Tech" that is the source for these measurements, as reported by the media, but a group calling themselves "The Virginia Tech Research Team". They maintain http://flintwaterstudy.org/ and you can evaluate them for yourself.

ianai10• 7 years ago

The 13k figure is accurate. Lead leaking into water from solder erosion doesn’t follow a constant, predictable level. The lead breaks off at intermittent rates into the flow. Please refer to other comments and sources for more.

romaaeterna2• 7 years ago

Looking at the team doing the test's web page doesn't provide great evidence for neutrality:

https://imgur.com/ZUoXQ52 http://flintwaterstudy.org/about-page/about-us/

In fact, they look like an advocacy organization, not scientific group at all. Something stinks to high heaven here, and it's not Flint's water.

zaroth2• 7 years ago

Please don’t let facts get in the way of a great narrative!

Here we have the Paper of Record saying they want to blame kids’ suspensions on a year’s exposure of barely elevated lead levels in water — levels which by the way probably put the average Flint house in the 90th percentile, but surely not the 99th percentile of houses nationwide. But national statistics don’t make a good story, you need a lens to present it through. So Flint might be that lens, but this is the media getting high on their own supply.

briandear3• 7 years ago

The real question is the issue of crime 50 years ago when lead was far more common everywhere. We’re crime rates higher in the past when lead was more prevalent?

The destruction of the two parent family probably has more impact on crime than lead.

openasocket3• 7 years ago

The "15ppb standard" isn't exactly what you think it is. The EPA "action level" (at which point they intervene, and the city is required to fix it) is if 10% of homes have more than 15ppb of lead. So if 10% of homes in Flint had 25ppb that's way above that action level. But, to be clear, being under that action level doesn't mean you are fine. The EPA and CDC explicitly say that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe.

fortran77• 7 years ago

There may also be lead from other sources. See:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326090313.h...

bobcostas55• 7 years ago

This chart of Flint lead levels really puts the whole crisis into perspective: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/blog_...

BurningFrog• 7 years ago

These are levels for 5 & 10 10 μg/dL.

I don't remember the exact number, and can't find it in 10 minutes of googling, but before leaded gasoline was banned, the US average was much higher.

My brain wants to say around 40. I probably misremember, but it was in that range.

Which is to say that while the Flint situation is bad, it's much better than how every kid grew up when I was young.

acuozzo• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

openasocket3• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that during the Flint water crisis everyone stopped drinking the lead contaminated water, so of course you aren't going to see a giant jump in the lead blood levels. That doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of lead in the water, and that doesn't mean it didn't have an impact on the residents.

yosefzeev• 7 years ago

All water connects, sooner or later. The problem should be fixed if for no other reason on account of this fact.

annoyingnoob• 7 years ago

This seems like a test case for the association between lead and crime. http://freakonomics.com/2007/07/09/lead-and-crime/

seminatl2• 7 years ago

Test case not really needed. The evidence supporting the lead-crime hypothesis is iron-clad at this point.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...

excalibur• 7 years ago

That lawsuit forced the state to establish the $3 million Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence, which began screening students.

That name though. The Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence is in Flint. It's like hosting an event called the Summit for Cancer-Free Japan, and holding it at Fukushima.

jtms4• 7 years ago

Friendly reminder to test your water for yourself a couple times a year. Do not take anyone else’s word for it. You can get decent tests online for $20-30 that will catch the most important types of contamination.

bilbo0s3• 7 years ago

Completely off topic, but:

Why, on earth, is this comment not voted higher?

There are people posting liberal or conservative political rants. People posting absurdities about how high lead levels have no effect on a human in any case. All category of senselessness is represented in posts higher than this one at this point.

And a comment with actionable information that can help people mitigate problems with the very issue being discussed is relegated to the bottom of the stack? I don't normally complain about HN, but it really is getting worse and worse lately.

aeorgnoieang• 7 years ago

Aren't you being insufficiently paranoid? No one should trust their municipal water authority but they can totally trust the makers of water testing kits? Obviously, everyone should reinvent all of the relevant chemistry and biology and manufacture their own water treatment infrastructure. [This is sarcasm. Your municipal water authority is probably fine. Everything involves tradeoffs.]

jtms4• 7 years ago

Trust, but verify :-)

bsanr25• 7 years ago

Glad to see Hacker News is again upholding Internet Rule 814: the comment section for any article alleging disparate impact of policy on a group presumed to be people of color will consist largely of posts attempting to contradict the article, rather than posts discussing what should be done if considering that the article's claims are true.

dang3• 7 years ago

The contrarian dynamic applies to every topic. Indeed, your comment is a classic phase-2 contrarian: the one that shows up to object to the objections. Those typically say something like "I can't believe the comments here are so X", and achieve ironic standing by getting upvoted to the top of the thread (which happened in this case). The mechanism is so universal that I don't think specific explanations are needed.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

But yes, race-related discussions are fraught, and there's little doubt that race-related, if not racist, beliefs and feelings lie behind some of what people say in them.

bsanr25• 7 years ago

The problem is less that controversial subjects draw contrarians than it is that anything that even approaches race is controversial; even with subjects in which the facts and science are pretty much concluded - like, say, the devastating effects of lead poisoning caused by water resource mismanagement - if PoC are to be the benefactors of rectification of the issue, said issue becomes questionable.

Given the context (American society and history), the situation is unlike other controversial topics. It's like comparing critical decision-making to kneejerk reactionism; we just can't seem to help ourselves. I feel like that's worth pointing out, above and beyond simple exhaustion with the "Actually" crowd.

briandear3• 7 years ago

I honestly didn’t have any idea of the demographics of Flint until you pointed it out. I did know the politics of Flint however. What I also know about Flint is that the government there has been historically inept and corrupt — a government elected by the people that live there. Of course my comment will naturally lead to an upholding of Internet Rule 815: find a way to blame Republicans and/or conservatives for the complete failures of governments that primarily represent people of color.

Flint was run by Democrats and they decided to end their water deal with Detroit, Detroit, also run by Democrats, decided to cut off Flint. Michigan’s Department of environmental quality, also not populated by Republicans, suppressed findings about Flint’s water and the federal EPA, led by a Democrat appointed by a Democrat president, knew about Flint water dangers for months and did nothing. The city of Flint destroyed its finances through the mismanagement of the Democrat leadership. The emergency manager, a Democrat, was kept in place by the Republican governor in order to be “bipartisan” and to ensure the locals were more comfortable than they would have been had a potentially more qualified, not necessarily Democrat, emergency manager been appointed. So the failure of that emergency manager is attributable to Snyder — but the reason the situation ended up existing in the first place was because of complete incompetence from the government that was elected by the people in Flint and exacerbated by the people that elected the government of Detroit.

Internet Rule 815: find a Republican or conservative anywhere near the scene of the crime and that Republican is the one deserving of all of the blame. This is closely related to Internet Rule 816, which is to immediately blame capitalism for the ineptitude of a government, especially one representing people of color.

dang3• 7 years ago

Would you please stop taking HN threads into partisan flamewar? You've done it over and over. We've warned you many times.

BrandonMarc2• 7 years ago

OR ...

The comments encourage critical thinking about the claims made by the post.

Dirlewanger• 7 years ago

In 100 years, Flint, Michigan is going to be one of those cases in US history books that shows the ugly side of the American spirit and how little faith we have in local government to do anything right (and how that's often the case).

BrandonMarc2• 7 years ago

Flint leadership deserves a lot of blame.

I read a story (can't find it) about a contractor who intended to do a high quality job taking care of the lead pipes ... but the city of Flint instead gave it to a different contractor, who charged more, did a crappier job (leaving many problems unfixed), used obsolete tech, and took longer.

But, the chosen contractor was politically connected, so ...

bilbo0s3• 7 years ago

The city of Flint was taken over by the state a long while ago. So the city would not have made that decision in any case.

The problem with Flint was that they thought having state government take them over and make all the decisions would result in better decisions being made. But that's not how it works. Sometimes, it just results in other people making bad decisions on your behalf.

Flint’s Children Suffer in Class After Years of Drinking the Lead-Poisoned Water

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