Technical thinking: Reflections on Flint

By Mark Jones

“Save water. Shower tomorrow” is the message on a billboard I just passed. It stood out from the others along I-75 near Flint, Mich., a mix of personal injury lawyers, fast food, and cannabis shops. As it happened, I was listening to a podcast on water. Seemed fitting. Flint is synonymous with water, now the posterchild for mismanagement of water technology. The podcast reinforced one of the lessons from Flint. Water is a local issue.

It has been ten years since the Flint Water Crisis unfolded. The anniversary has spurred new reporting on the crisis and its aftermath. The reporting on the 10-year anniversary has, in my opinion, largely gotten things wrong. There is considerable focus on the on-going removal of lead pipes. It fails to mention lead wasn’t present in the water before mismanagement of the water infrastructure even though it was supplied through the same pipes that are now being removed. Those lead pipes did not present an unacceptable exposure risk so long as the water supplied was treated correctly. Lead pipes were a hazard, but the risk was acceptable as long as appropriate steps were taken to control pH and add corrosion inhibitors to the water.

Lead is clearly a hazard — a danger to human health and to the environment. The list of hazardous materials and devices is long. Gasoline is flammable and hazardous. We’ve developed protocols for its use and largely use it without incident. It is hazardous but we continue to use it because we’ve tamed the risk. Engineering allows many hazards to be managed, making the risks associated with many technologies tolerable. We accept the hazard because the risk is reduced to a level we can live with.

Eliminating hazards, such as by removing all lead from water lines, does eliminate the risk of lead exposure. Passivating the lead surfaces, just as was done decades ago when the pipes were first installed, sufficiently reduced the risk of lead exposure. The flaw was not in the pipes or in the recognized technology to moderate the risk. The flaw was lack of sufficient knowledge. The people entrusted with the water system took over to reduce costs. Cuts were made without realizing the importance of the chemicals eliminated in maintaining a safe water supply.

I don’t worry about the supply or quality of the water at my house, at least I didn’t before Flint. I generally trust the municipal system providing the water, but I am paying more attention. I read the annual report on water quality. I periodically check the Environmental Working Groups tapwater database for red flags. The Flint Water Crisis should make us all question the trust we place in critical infrastructure. Flint shows how rapidly infrastructure can decay without correct care. A safely operating system was wrecked it in short order.

Flint isn’t about lead, it is about expertise and trust, something it shares with other recent disasters: the Surfside condo collapse, Deepwater Horizon, the Morandi Bridge collapse the Titan submersible. The list goes on-and-on, and will surely, sadly, grow in the future.