FLINT, MICH.—A day off in Flint. William Miller got his hair cut and his van fixed up. Then he needed something to drink, so he did what people here do, still, three years into this fiasco.

He drove to the parking lot beside the boarded-up bowling alley that says “ESTAURANT” on the side. He stopped at the four stop signs. He gave his address and his order to a woman holding a clipboard and wearing a fluorescent yellow vest.

“Twelve!” LaKrisha Shumon shouted ahead, and Miller, a 49-year-old surgical assistant who also owns a medical transport business, crept forward so that the men in vests could load the van with 12 free cases of Walmart’s Great Value Purified Drinking Water.

He comes every week. His anger has not subsided.

“It’s disgusting,” Miller, a trim man with a goatee and a grey college sweatshirt, said in an interview out his car window. “I should not have to do this. I’m a middle-class person. This is not the way life is supposed to be in this country. It’s morally reprehensible.”

He could, in theory, just turn on his tap. Eight months after Republican Gov. Rick Snyder belatedly acknowledged a problem with Flint’s water, Snyder officials told residents in June that their water was safe to drink with a filter.

Not happening.

These same state departments also told Flint residents their water was fine when it was actually poison. Their trust in government is gone now, maybe forever.

And while lead levels have fallen below the federal danger threshold, residents know now that no amount of lead is truly safe, they know the city’s work on its pipes poses new contamination risks, and they say the water is still foul-smelling and still making them sick. So they show up at the Eastown Bowl and Flint’s eight other drive-thru distribution sites six days a week, forming water lines rarely seen outside the world’s poorest and most parched nations.

Some of them won’t even do that. Occupational therapist Audrey Muhammad buys her own bottled water, and only in the suburbs. She is suspicious of anything run by the state and city authorities.

“It’s kind of like: I’m going to stab you, but I’m going to give you the surgery to repair the wound,” said Muhammad, 51, a woman with a hijab and a broad smile, at a recent benefit concert. “How can you trust that the person that stabs you is going to take care of the wound the proper way?”

Twelve people in the Flint area died from a legionnaires’ disease outbreak after the city and state made the disastrous decision to use the Flint River as its water source. Thousands of Flint children were exposed to lead. The damage to them will reveal itself slowly, over decades, as the neurotoxin affects their health, behaviour and ability to learn and earn.

The network cameras have mostly gone now, off to cover faster-moving disasters. But even the short-term crisis has not come close to passing.

A full year after the water became an international scandal, Flint is a city fearful, fatigued and furious: terrified of the unknowable harm to come, worn down by years of fighting, enraged by what they see as the continued failure of government to support them. A flurry of recent good-news announcements, of tens of millions of dollars in coming investment, have not changed the widespread perception that this poor, majority-black city has been abandoned again.

“We wear the shirts that say Flint Lives Matter, but we’re like — they matter to us, but other than that, not at all,” said Melissa Mays, 38, the city’s most prominent citizen water activist. “We are getting worse, we’re not getting better, and we literally scream this, but Trump trumps us in the media.”

The pediatrician who exposed the spike in local children’s blood-lead levels is more optimistic. Mona Hanna-Attisha said “so many awesome things are happening,” pointing to government and philanthropic programs for the young. But she too said “we’re still very much in this crisis.”

“People are angry and traumatized, and there’s a lot more work to do,” she said. “The biggest part of this crisis is that trauma, that stress, that betrayal, that anxiety, that guilt. The mental health issue is the biggest one.”

At the moment, Hanna-Attisha said, “everybody’s blaming everything on the water,” from learning disabilities to early-onset dementia. In her clinic, she spends a significant chunk of time trying to assure parents that their children are not doomed, that homework and hugs can improve their trajectory.

“It’s like I’m writing prescriptions for hope,” she said.

The warning letters arrived in Flint mailboxes in early March. Their demand, of almost unfathomable audacity, is delivered in red capital letters, underlined for emphasis: pay for your poison or else.

Snyder’s government, which was largely responsible for the water disaster, announced in February that it would stop giving Flint residents subsidies for their water. Mayor Karen Weaver then decided to resume the practice of shutting off the water for people with unpaid bills.

Coercive water shut-offs are controversial in the U.S. under normal circumstances, castigated by the United Nations as a violation of human rights. In Flint, which charged people some of the highest water rates in the country for killer gunk, the threats have been greeted with a mix of astonishment and told-you-so resignation.

“The people in Flint should not have to pay for water for at least a decade,” Hanna-Attisha said.

Thousands of residents have been refusing to pay for a year or more. Some say they will continue the protest even though parents without running water are regularly investigated by child protection authorities.

“I’m not going to give them one penny,” said Nakiya Wakes, 41, a stay-at-home-mom-turned-activist who owes $822.62. She had two miscarriages before the authorities warned pregnant women not to drink Flint water, and she believes the lead is also responsible for the worsening behaviour of her 8-year-old son, who has been suspended from school dozens of times.

Mays, a combative woman with a jagged sense of humour and little regard for social niceties, said she will try come up with an “insane” solution, like rigging up a cistern for an outdoor shower, rather than relent.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Everyone says, ‘You guys just want something for free.’ No, we just don’t want to pay to have ourselves killed,” Mays, 38, said over her usual snack of coffee and pickles at a Flint bookstore-cafe. “I’m not going to pay a hit man to kill me.”

Four days later, a judge approved a settlement in a lawsuit filed by Mays and several advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union. Snyder’s government agreed to spend $87 million to replace at least 18,000 of Flint’s lead and galvanized-steel water lines by 2020.

The activists hailed the agreement. But the need for a lawsuit to speed up the glacial process of fixing Flint’s deadly infrastructure has galled a city already steaming over what is widely seen as a lack of accountability for the calamity.

These days, the dissatisfaction is often expressed in Facebook rants and quiet conversations between friends. The length of the crisis has sapped public enthusiasm for street protests and pressure calls to legislators.

“The longer that it goes on, the less people that are getting into it,” said LuLu Brezzell, 27, a photographer. “How would you feel if you were ignored for years and nothing has been done? How would you feel? A lot of people don’t really have the will to keep fighting.”

Last year, more charges have been filed by the Michigan attorney general investigating the lead-tainted crisis in Flint, Michigan, including charges against two former state-appointed emergency managers.

The state attorney general has laid charges against 13 people, including felony charges against two of the former Snyder-appointed “emergency managers” who presided over the fatal decision to switch from Lake Huron water to save money. Snyder himself, though, has not been charged — and he has spent more than $3.5 million of taxpayer money on criminal lawyers for himself.

“Someone should be in jail at this point. Because the magnitude of this calamity and the coverup — no one’s in jail. That’s atrocious. And everything that went on in the city, the governor knew about,” Miller said, expressing a common though unproven sentiment. “Mr. Governor: fess up.”

Open mic night at Totem Books, the funky store where Mays is known as “pickles and coffee lady.” A young, multiracial crowd of about 45 gathered to listen to a white woman sing about Jesus, a black woman recite a poem about her sex life, a white man tell bad jokes. One of them was about outsiders asking ignorant questions about the water.

“It’s not that you want to try to get away with strangling somebody,” the amateur comic said, “it’s the frequency at which you think about it.”

At the same time as the people of Flint decry the fading attention to their water problems, they lament that they are now known for little else. This is a vibrant community, they say, creative, resilient and unusually tight-knit, a post-industrial survivor primed for yet another comeback.

But the water still looms over everything, even the hip hangouts. And even the optimism about Flint’s future is tinged with concern. Of all the programs that have been launched in the past two years to help Flint — expanded access to preschool, Medicaid health coverage for young people, kids’ “nutrition prescriptions” for fresh fruits and vegetables — few are sure to be funded beyond the next few years.

“This is not a two- to three-year recovery,” said Hanna-Attisha. “The commitments and the resources are not there for the long-term.”

Much of the city already feels shortchanged.

Children under the age of 6, who are most susceptible to the impact of lead, have been the overwhelming focus of the aid programs. Adults, though, have suffered too. There has been little assistance for them other than the water subsidies.

Ronda Thornton stood outside her house last Saturday afternoon. Next door was “the hooker house” once occupied by a sex worker, now derelict. Beside that was a derelict food market. The sidewalk was cracked. The only sign of life was the traffic across the road, coming and going from one of Flint’s ubiquitous liquor stores.

Thornton, a chatty 51-year-old with a hard face betraying her rough life, fell seriously ill before she learned the water was unsafe, drinking more and more water to try to “flush out” whatever was wrong with her, dropping from 112 pounds to 88 pounds. Now she uses buckets to deal with the holes in the roof, and her food stamps, $77 a month, aren’t enough to keep her fed.

“I’m disabled, my husband’s disabled,” she said. “We can’t even get no help because we don’t have kids in our home. It’s like, what do they expect us to do, just drop dead?”

The government did acknowledge her existence on March 2. She got a letter telling her to pay her overdue water bill of more than $240.

“The health of our community,” the city explained, “is dependent on getting payments from our customers.”