Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder may ask for help from the Federal Government to deal with the water-poisoning crisis that the people of Flint are facing, according to The Detroit News. Snyder recently declared a state of emergency in Flint on Tuesday.
The troubles in Flint appear to have begun when the city declared a financial emergency for financial mismanagement in 2014. From that time, the state of Michigan then gradually took over the running of several aspects of the City of Flint.
Because of the history of financial mismanagement, Flint was under a lot of pressure to try to reduce its expenditure by any means possible. One of the ways of saving money that it came up with was a plan to not buy its drinking water from Detroit. All this time, it was buying its water from Detroit, which was pumping it in turn from Lake Huron. The proposed new alternative was to source the water from the river Flint, after which the city itself is named, according to USA Today.
Residents were skeptical because the water in the river Flint had a reputation for being filthy and contaminated. But because of the pressure to cut expenditure, the water supply for Flint was shifted to the river Flint roughly two years ago.
Nobody in Flint realized the enormity of the problem until a children's doctor started investigating the issue and started speaking out against what she saw. When Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha investigated this matter, she found that there were high levels of lead in the bodies of Flint children. The way that the lead had made its way to their bodies is interesting. A part of the water supply in Flint comprises water pipes made of lead - because the water from the Flint river was many times more corrosive than other drinking water, pumping the new water through the same water pipes lead to some of the lead deteriorating. This lead then found its way to the families and children in Flint, according to CNN.
