The problem dates back to April 2014, when Flint was under the direction of an emergency manager appointed by the state to try to fix the broken city. (Michigan law provides for the governor to select managers, and the provision has been used in several places in recent years, most prominently Detroit.) To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit’s system, which was deemed too costly. But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

The move saved millions, but the problems started becoming apparent almost immediately. The water starting smelling like rotten eggs. Engineers responded to that problem by jacking up the chlorine level, leading to dangerous toxicity. GM discovered that city water was corroding engines at a Flint factory and switched sources. Then children and others started getting rashes and falling sick. Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental-engineering professor, found that the water had nearly 900 times the recommend EPA limit for lead particles. As my colleague Alana Semuels noted in a deeply reported feature in July 2015, residents believe the city knew about problems as soon as May 2014. Yet as late as February 2015, even after tests showed dangerous lead levels, officials were telling residents there was no threat.

The July 2015 date on Semuels’ story emphasizes the incredible slowness of authorities to respond. That was more than a year after the switch to water from the Flint River. This week’s state declaration of Emergency comes some 20 months after the switch. How did it take so long to get anything done?

Semuels described the deeply interlocked series of causes in her piece:

But it’s not one emergency manager, or one bad decision about pumping water from the Flint River that has led these problems—and that might be the scariest part of all. Neglected infrastructure is really to blame, but it’s not quite as satisfying to blame old pipes as it is to blame the people in charge. And the city’s financial woes have a lot to do with its shrinking population, but it’s hard to blame the people who left in hopes of finding employment or a better life elsewhere. Eroding infrastructure isn’t unique to Flint. Things just broke down there first.

Even if the causes of the crisis are elaborate and inevitable, the state’s slow response provides ways to think a little bit about how the response broke down.

First, there’s a question of democracy. As Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013, the emergency-manager law raises serious questions about representation. If the manager is appointed by the state, he or she is not answerable to the population at the ballot box, and that means he or she is far less accountable when things go wrong. (This is exacerbated by the fact that the cities with managers are mostly Democratic, largely by virtue of being cities, while Snyder is a Republican.) That’s not just a bug—it's also a feature, since the managers are thought to be able to make painful but necessary choices that an elected official just won’t have the stomach to make. Flint’s water shows what can happen when the link between residents and authorities is broken: months of poisoned water supply.