Before Flint’s water made national headlines, before it was deemed contaminated enough to be considered toxic waste, before it was discovered to cause of lead poisoning in young children, before it brought to action everyone from President Obama to Pearl Jam, Ron Fonger was asking questions.

A veteran reporter for The Flint Journal and MLive, Fonger has written more than 250 stories on the city’s water issues since its water supply was switched to the Flint River in April 2014, a cost-cutting move that turned out to be disastrous. Early on, he hounded local government officials who repeatedly assured citizens that the river water was drinkable. (In a piece published on Sept. 14, 2014, Fonger quoted ex-Flint Mayor Dayne Walling as saying, “It’s a quality, safe product. I think people are wasting their precious money buying bottled water.”)

The media has been criticized for its lack of early coverage of Flint’s water debacle, though journalists such as Fonger and Curt Guyette of the ACLU of Michigan laid crucial groundwork for the issue to finally reach the national spotlight. To get a clearer timeline of the fallout in Flint, one can browse back to the start of Fonger’s tackling of the topic—he heard complaints about the water’s appearance, taste and smell just days after the switch in the supply. He reported on the rash of positive tests for total coliform bacteria in the water and an elevated presence of total trihalomethanes (TTHMs), which are linked with bladder cancer. Fonger obtained documents that show Flint filed false reports about testing for lead in the water and later wrote about Virginia Tech’s alarming findings that the drinking water was causing lead contamination in homes.

In between covering the latest developments in the water disaster—including the recent release of Michigan Gov. Snyder’s emails—Ron answered questions in a Reddit AMA and spoke with Upvoted. Here’s what he had to say.

When were you first alerted to issues with Flint’s water?

I started hearing things in the first half of 2014, in the days and weeks after they switched [to the Flint River]. At first, it was anecdotal stuff. People would show up at city council meetings with a jug of water that was discolored and say, “Something is wrong with the water. It’s coming out of the tap this way and burning my kids and making my hair fall out.” People were complaining that it had a heavy chemical smell.

The city’s infrastructure was in really bad shape before this ever happened. That winter, we had hundreds of water main breaks and bacteria was getting in the water. There were boil-water advisories being issued. That went on for a long time and people never stopped complaining.

What happened next?

At the very end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015, there was a night I remember very clearly. It was a Friday at the end of the day, and I got a call from a city council member. We were just kind of talking shop and he said, “Yeah, it’s gonna be great. We’ve got this cancer-causing chemical in our water.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And he was like, “I was just over at City Hall. They just sent out notices today to everyone in the city saying they have high levels of TTHM (total trihalomethanes) in the water.”

TTHM is a byproduct of chlorinating water, and a carcinogen. And I’m like, “What in the world? Why would they send that out and not give people some kind of explanation or warning?” There was no discussion of it. I got a hold of some people at the city and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we were gonna tell you about that.” And I’m like, “We need to talk to somebody right now. You guys are going to scare the crap out of people. You need to explain what’s happened.” That started months and months and months of Flint being out of compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act.

What did city officials originally say about the water?

The former Department of Public Works Director [Howard Croft] was constantly having to defend the quality of the water. Our residents brought in a sample of water in a water bottle and set it on a table and said, “You think this is good water? You drink it.” So I saw him pick up the bottle of water and drink it.

From the start of this, there has been a lot of denial from the city and the state. Every time someone raised a question, their response was always, “Well, the water meets all the standards” or “Yes, we’re out of compliance on this or that but we’re working on it and the water is safe.”

What were some of your biggest reports?

We were first to report on the study by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha from the Hurley Medical Center in Flint who went back and looked at the blood lead data that the state maintains in the database and was able to determine that not only did we have elevated lead in the water, but also that the percentage of kids with elevated blood lead levels had doubled since we switched to the Flint river. That really shifted the story into high gear.

We were also able to show through FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) that the city was filing false reports with the state about its lead testing program. One of the things people found out was that if you have a lead service line leading to your house, which about half the houses in Flint do, you have a lot higher chance of having elevated lead in your water. And so we started asking, “Hey, why don’t you show us which houses have lead service lines so we know who should be concerned? The city’s response was, “Well, those records aren’t easily accessible. They’re kept on maps and we have data on about 45,000 index cards.” These were like flash cards that you see at school. That was incredible.

So we FOIA’d the copies of the index cards. We looked at the cards and the majority of the addresses didn’t have any data at all to support that they had lead service lines. So it was like, “Okay, you guys are vastly understating the problem and your tests are kind of invalid.”

Why do you think the issue was so slow to receive national attention?

The information didn’t all come out at once. It was like there was a new development and it turned the screw a little bit more. It felt like we were building a historical record of things. I had no idea we were going to end up where we are now. The more we find out about it, the worse the situation looks.

What are the most heartbreaking stories you’ve heard from residents?

It’s not one of those stories where someone says, ‘My son drank the water and then he was dead.’ It’s more like, ‘My son drank the water for the past year and now everything we know about lead says this will cost him points off his IQ and could cause behavioral problems.” But I’ve seen people show up at town hall meetings and start crying about the personal fallout in their own lives. Now there’s the news of Legionnaires’ Disease—10 people in the area died. They haven’t been able to say yes or no to there being a connection between Legionnaires’ and the water, but if there is, that would be the ultimate fallout.

Has your own life been affected by the crisis?

I live in Flushing Township, but I work in Flint. At the office, we have lead-clearing filters in place. The water tastes fine.

As we know, newspapers are in a dire state. Has that affected your reporting on this?

This is my 20th year. I tell people that when I first came to work at The Flint Journal, we had five people working full-time in our library and now we have about that many trying to cover the news. But I think we’re able to do a good job with it. These types of stories don’t look like much when they begin but as the screw turns a little bit each day, we just have to keep paying attention. Almost everyone on staff has been working on almost nothing but water.

Why do you keep doing what you do?

It is a elementary responsibility of government to be able to be believed and to be able to provide a service as elementary as water. The more we know, the more damning it is on the people who were in a position to do something about this. There are still new revelations coming out and we’re having to extract it piece by piece by piece. I don’t think it’s all been extracted yet.