In the spring of 2014, state-appointed emergency managers took control of the local government in Flint, Mich., to cut costs during the city’s financial crisis. One of those cost-cutting measures—switching the city’s drinking water supply from that used by nearby Detroit to the Flint River—resulted in water contaminated with lead and Legionnaires’ disease, and spurred a years-long crisis with effects that reverberate a decade later.
Ten years after the onset of the Flint water crisis, policy changes have improved water quality in Flint, and community response to the crisis helped make concepts like environmental racism and environmental justice more salient to national politics.
“The politics that happened [around water quality] in Michigan have really played a big role at the federal scale,” said Olivia David, a policy researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan.
Policy Progress
The city switched its water system back to the one used by Detroit in October 2015. That system, now known as the Great Lakes Water Authority, sources its water from the Detroit River and Lake Huron.
In 2018, Michigan revised its Lead and Copper Rule, requiring Flint and all other municipalities in the state to replace all lead water service lines (pipes that connect homes to community water mains) by 2041. According to the updated rule, the lead pipes must be replaced at the expense of the water supplier, regardless of ownership.
The 2018 revision also required the creation of water system advisory councils for all systems serving communities of at least 50,000 people. The councils oversee all aspects of water and its intersections with public health. Members of advisory councils “talk about whatever matters to residents, about the water they’re drinking and bathing in and paying for,” said Ben Pauli, the acting chair of Flint’s Water System Advisory Council, a political scientist at Kettering University in Flint, and president of the board of the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint, an advocacy organization.
In 2023, the state passed its Filter First laws, requiring schools and childcare centers to install lead-reducing filters regardless of whether the water had been found to contain lead. Pauli noted that advocates in other states are looking to Michigan’s laws to provide a framework for Filter First legislation elsewhere.
Pauli said the Flint water crisis also informed new efforts to regulate contaminants that weren’t a problem in Flint but affected other parts of the state, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). “The aggressive manner in which [PFAS contamination has] been confronted by the state of Michigan, and now at the federal level, too, is partly a product of the more vigilant attitude that we’re taking around environmental contamination coming out of Flint,” Pauli said.
Landmark federal policies, too, were spurred in part by the Flint crisis—the Biden administration announced in October 2024 that all drinking water systems nationwide will need to replace lead service lines within 10 years.
Advocates in Flint acknowledge the progress that has been made but are still pushing for policy changes. Many, for example, are calling for a repeal of the law that allowed emergency managers to take control of the city government in 2014 to begin with.
Advocacy organizations have also been working for years to pass a federal law called the WATER (Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability) Act, which would allocate funding for water infrastructure, David said.
And Flint still faces other environmental justice stressors, such as the construction of an asphalt plant in a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood.
Shifting the Conversation
“It’s pretty clear that [the Flint water crisis] had a big influence in putting environmental justice on the map in a new way.”
In addition to concrete policy changes, the Flint water crisis helped make the concept of environmental justice a national discussion. In 2023, the Biden administration allocated funds to the Justice40 initiative, whose goal is that “40 percent of the overall benefits of certain Federal climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
“It’s pretty clear that [the Flint water crisis] had a big influence in putting environmental justice on the map in a new way and getting state officials and others to treat it as a priority,” Pauli said. He added that the Flint water crisis and how communities responded to it come up all the time in conversations within EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, on which he serves.
The Flint water crisis changed how policymakers and advocates think about the role of water, too: In a 2024 paper, David pointed out three main shifts in water politics since the beginning of the crisis. First, awareness of the importance of water policy has reached a level not seen since the 1970s, when the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act passed. Second, there’s a greater focus on water access and affordability, not just on water quality. And third, politicians have paid greater attention to the racial dynamics of water policies, largely due to local activists’ efforts.
“People can conceptualize water issues as issues of structural racism more easily because of what happened,” David said.
“Community-Based, Participatory Research”
Although scientists played a crucial role in establishing the extent of the original water quality problem in Flint, the rush of scientists into the city in the wake of the crisis didn’t always end well, Pauli explained. One of the scientists who helped expose the extent of the contamination, for example, ultimately sued community members after disagreements over water quality. (The case was dismissed.)
“In some ways, the study of the impacts of the crisis will be never-ending.”
In response to the influx of researchers hoping to work with Flint residents, Flint community members formed coalitions like the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center and Community Based Organization Partners to promote ethical, inclusive, and accountable research. “There’s a long history in Flint of community-based, participatory research that goes back decades, but that kind of approach…was really invigorated by the crisis,” Pauli said.
“There are so many aspects to what happened here,” Pauli continued, and there are still opportunities for scientists to document the far-reaching impact of the crisis. There are “so many effects that the crisis has had, not just on people’s physical health, but [also on their] mental health, financial health, and so on.”
“In some ways,” he noted, “the study of the impacts of the crisis will be never-ending.”
—Grace van Deelen (@GVD__), Staff Writer
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