Flint, Michigan has been poisoned. It’s all over the news. In part due to the efforts of a courageous mother of four who fought to make sure the story got out. From the very beginning the City of Flint tried to keep her quiet. They called her a liar, they threatened her, and they tried to buy her off.

This all began when the City of Flint decided to save a little money on water by switching to a cheaper water source: the Flint River. Turns out, that was a pretty bad idea. Nobody knew for certain that water from the Flint River would strip lead out of the city’s aging pipelines and dump it into the homes of Flint residents. Most cities have lead pipes in their water infrastructure — yours probably does, mine did until just 1998. It’s not uncommon, and it’s usually not a problem.

Around 100,000 people were exposed to potentially toxic levels of lead, but it was an accident. It wasn’t deliberate. Nobody wanted this to happen.

The response by Michigan authorities, on the other hand, was deliberate — willfully calculated, and deeply harmful. At every turn, they attempted to discredit experts, to cover up the problem, and silence citizens who dared to speak out in defense of their community.

One of the people who first came forward about the problem is a woman named LeeAnne Walters. She’s a mother of four, and she first noticed something was wrong with the water when her kids started breaking out in rashes — when their hair started falling out.

LeeAnne has been fighting for the people of Flint ever since. She did, and is doing, everything she can to find a solution, to spread awareness and to help her community through this crisis.

“The city is helping more, but for the most part citizens are doing all the work, and it’s all coming out of our pockets,” LeeAnne said.

When I spoke to her, she had just gotten off the phone with a 73-year-old woman in her city. LeeAnne urged her to buy a filter, but she couldn’t afford one. LeeAnne bought one and brought it out to her.

That’s what her days look like now. In between raising two young children and two teens, LeeAnne is sometimes on the phone for thirteen hours a day. She talks to neighbors and community organizers, making sure that people have what they need to weather this storm.

“I ’m just a mom, trying my best to help,” she says.

But authorities in Flint have different ideas about LeeAnne, in part because she refused to be bought off and she refused to be quiet.

In early 2015, before LeeAnne knew that her son had lead poisoning, she knew something was wrong with the water. It was discolored, tasted wrong and caused skin to blister and break out in rashes. LeeAnne went to city hall to seek some kind of solution.

The city tested her water and found that the lead concentration in LeeAnne’s tap water was around 398 parts per billion. According to the CDC, lead toxicity can occur at any amount higher than 15 parts per billion. The Flint water department immediately advised her to stop using the water — they even offered to remove the lead service line to her house for free.

Excerpt from the blood test results

Worried, LeeAnne took her three-year-old son Gavin to have his blood tested by a specialist in Ann Arbor — everyone in the family had some symptoms of lead poisoning but Gavin has a compromised immune system due to a prior medical condition. He was particularly vulnerable.

On April 2nd, she got the tests back, and the amount of lead in Gavin’s blood was abnormally high. The doctor advised LeeAnne to give the information to her son’s primary care physician as soon as possible and to stop using the water.

It all clicked into place. Her son’s health problems, the rashes, the dirty water. LeeAnne went back to city hall to speak with the mayor, the report from Gavin’s doctor in hand. The mayor refused to see her, and she was referred to the city’s legal department.

The legal department looked at the evidence she presented, the water report, her son’s blood test, and they handed her a claim form.

“They told me to write down a number. I couldn’t believe it. How could I come up with a dollar amount for my child being poisoned?” LeeAnne said.

She filled out the form and she left.

On April 14, 2015 a city representative came to LeeAnne Walters’ home and promised that the lead service line — the source of the lead in her water — would be replaced by the city at no cost to her as promised, on one condition. The representative handed her a contract. Attached, was the claim form she filled out at City Hall, her son’s blood test, and the water test report.

Excerpt from the contract presented to Mrs. Walters

The contract was just one and a half pages, outlining how much the city would pay to replace her water line in exchange for her silence. By signing the contract she’d get a new water line, valued at eleven hundred dollars, but she would sign away any future right to sue the city of Flint. By signing the contract, she had to admit that the lead in her water — the lead that would be present in her son’s blood for the rest of his life — was not the result of any wrongdoing or negligence by the city of Flint. Yes, your son has lead poisoning, the contract seemed to say, yes the poisoning is the result of the city water coming into your home, yes the water full of lead because of a choice that we made, but it’s not our fault.

LeeAnne was speechless. She refused to sign the contract.

A few days later, a city councilman showed up at her door. Councilman Scott Kincaid has served on the Flint City Council for over 30 years, he’s well known and respected in the community. He’s a fierce advocate for the people of Flint, and former president of the city council. According to LeeAnne, he pressured her to sign the contract, stating that not signing it would harm her children — that not signing the contract would further expose her family to the poisonous water coming out of her service line.

She held her ground, she refused to sign the contract.

If they couldn’t keep her quiet, they would do everything they could to make sure that nobody believed her.

“The city did a really good job of trying to discredit the work I was doing, they went to meetings telling people I was crazy or in it for money — that I was stupid,” she said.

At one meeting, Mike Prysby from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said that if anyone believed her that they were ‘stupid’ — there was no way the polluted water she brought to the meeting was from her home faucet. It was too dirty.

Frustrated, LeeAnne reached out to environmental scientists at Virginia Tech, and by June the story broke wide open. Independent researchers were crawling all over the city, testing water from dozens of homes. By October, the city announced they’d be going back to buying water from Detroit.

LeeAnne is relieved, but says the fight isn’t over. Now it’s about accountability and planning for the future.

That’s the tricky thing about lead poisoning. It never goes away. It’s not like e. coli or cholera, in some ways bacterial infections are easier to treat. They have fast-acting symptoms and predictable treatment patterns — you know right away that you’re sick.

Lead poisoning is about the long term. Once it’s in your blood, it mimics the calcium your body uses to build and repair bone and it stays there forever. It’s cumulative, and children are particularly vulnerable because their bodies are still developing. At blood concentrations around 1.9 micrograms per deciliter, children begin to experience long term cognitive and behavioral issues that can manifest in decreased academic performance, ADHD, and stunted growth later on in life.

Gavin Walters has a concentration of 6.9 micrograms per deciliter in his blood.

Even though the water will be safer in the future, the damage is done and for LeeAnne and the people of Flint, this fight is far from over.

To get involved you can visit flintwaterstudy.org, flintwaterinfo.com or the one of the many Flint, Michigan GoFundMe pages.