Back a couple of years ago, Flint, Michigan was a Thing in our politics. It was a man-made tragedy that resulted from a number of decisions made by Michigan’s unified Republican government, which, given that it was a unified Republican government in the 21st century, meant that it didn’t give much of a damn about places like Flint and the people who lived there. Of course, because we have the national attention span of a flea, Flint slipped from the top of the news as the nation prepared to elevate a vulgar talking yam to the highest office in its government, with all that entailed. However, at least for the people and the politics in Flint itself, the crisis remains a Thing of life and death.

First, it seems that researchers on the ground there have been studying an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease that occurred at roughly the same time as the water crisis began, and that those researchers have concluded that the switch from Lake Huron water to water from the Flint River, a move that was the source of the crisis, was responsible for the outbreak. From Michigan Public Radio:

Swanson says when Flint was getting its water from Lake Huron, all the chlorine measurements were tightly tracking. But once the city switched to the Flint River, the chlorine numbers became chaotic. Some regions in the city had very high chlorine levels, others had very low levels, and still others bounced from high to low. Swanson says once they know what the chlorine concentration was in a particular neighborhood at a particular time, they can layer on top of that who got Legionnaires' disease, along with where they lived, and when they got the disease. "And so when you take those four years of data," she says, "You get a very clear relationship that more chlorine, the less likely to get disease in your neighborhood.”

The state department of public health has pushed back against the study. Meanwhile, the effect of the lead in the water is beginning to show up among the children in Flint, as Rochelle Riley reports in The Detroit Free Press.

Snyder and his administration didn’t cut it either, apparently ignoring the reading mission the same way they ignored the Flint water crisis: Third-grade reading proficiency in Flint, where Snyder allowed the water — and children — to be poisoned by lead, dropped from 41.8% in 2013, the first year of the poisoning, to 10.7% last year. That’s a nearly three-quarters drop… "We’re in crisis mode,” said Flint school board vice president Harold Woodson. But, he said, the crisis didn’t begin with the water crisis and won’t end unless state officials take seriously how poverty, which is rampant in Flint and other districts across Michigan, affects children. “We were able to put a nurse in all of our elementary buildings and we’re investing more in looking at the behavior of the children,” he said. “But the impact from the lead might not manifest itself for another year or two.”

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The reading proficiency problem isn’t limited to Flint. Third-grade reading proficiency dropped statewide from that 70% Snyder boasted about in 2015 to 44% last year. In Detroit, where thousands of children also have been victims of lead poisoning caused by massive blight abatement and renovation of homes, third-grade reading proficiency dropped from 11.7% three years ago to 9.9% this year.

During the time in which the crisis was at the top of the news, people in Flint begged visiting journalists not to assume that the crisis was over simply because there were other stories to cover elsewhere. This is what they meant.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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