NOVA

- In Flint, Michigan... - Here's to Flint.

...officials try to save money

by changing the city's water source,

but instead endanger public health.

We were so sick.

We were experiencing hair loss.

We realized it wasn't just our home.

People are getting poisoned

because you're not treating the water right.

The pipes carrying the water

are corroding, leaching lead into the system,

and putting thousands of children in danger.

Once a child has lead in their blood,

there is not much that you can do about it.

Even one swallow of that water

would cause lead poisoning of a child.

One swallow.

How did this happen?

We were fighting the very agencies

who were supposed to enforce the law.

Can the people of Flint use science to fight back?

- What do we want? - Clean water!

Now, it's a massive job to make Flint safe.

There's probably over

20,000 lead service lines in the city.

In Flint and around the country...

We've got millions of those lead pipes out there.

Might be in front of your house.

"Poisoned Water."

Right now, on NOVA.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following.

This is our moment,

so I think we need a countdown, from three?

Three, two, one...

I hear it.

All right.

Here's to Flint. Hear, hear.

With the push of a button,

the city of Flint, Michigan, switches to a new source

for its drinking water... The Flint River.

That switch would soon become a disastrous combination

of poisoned water and misuse of science.

I remember the switch

because it was my daughter's birthday.

It was April 25.

City and elected officials, a lot of them were saying,

you know, "This is gonna save us so much money,"

and "This is a good thing."

And we're like, oh, boy, you know, holding our breath.

There was nothing wrong

with the city's old water source, Lake Huron.

So why make the switch at all?

Mainly, to save money.

Flint is a blue-collar, industrial city.

We are the home of General Motors.

We have experienced,

like other cities and areas in the Rust Belt,

tremendous decline in jobs.

Since the late 1950s,

GM closed seven major facilities in the region.

Tens of thousands of jobs were lost.

We have a couple special orders this evening.

In 2011, with the city close to bankruptcy,

Governor Rick Snyder stripped power from city officials,

and assigned a series of emergency managers

to fix Flint's financial crisis.

An emergency manager can come into a community,

take the powers of a mayor and a city council

and make decisions.

We want to maintain access

to a clean, sustainable water source.

For decades, Flint purchased treated water

at a premium price from Detroit.

Now, the emergency manager and city officials

pursue a plan to save millions

by building a pipeline to Lake Huron.

It would take years to finish.

Until then, the city would draw water from the Flint River,

and treat it at the old Flint water plant.

There were problems from the very start.

Rusty water came out as soon as we turned it on.

So right then and there,

you know, my wife being pregnant,

she was like, "We're not gonna use the water."

My clothes in the washing machine

are smelling like bleach,

smelling like rotten eggs.

We started to get rashes,

listlessness, muscle aches and pains.

Where's the other piggy at?

LeeAnne Walters was a stay-at-home mom

with three-year-old twin boys and a teenaged daughter.

My hairdresser was very concerned

because my hair was thinning out pretty badly,

And then we started noticing it in my daughter,

and in other... you know, my sons and my husband.

When we had our first bout of brown water,

We didn't understand what was happening.

We were told by the city

that they were winterizing the system.

But we had lived here for years at that point,

we'd never experienced anything like that.

Am I hot? You are hot.

These problems led Walters

to ask detailed questions about how the water was being treated.

I started requesting documents from the city.

I wanted to know about the water treatment plant,

and how they were treating the water,

what chemicals they were using,

what their raw water data was before they treated the water.

With no training in civil engineering,

this was her own independent investigation.

Her first question:

how does water get treated?

As LeeAnne Walters discovers, at the time of the switch,

local authorities set out to treat water from the Flint River

much the way any other city would.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Cincinnati,

which has been treating river water for 200 years.

In both Flint and Cincinnati,

the water starts out essentially the same:

straight from the river, brown and cloudy with particles.

Now, you see the water is very cloudy,

and all these particulates,

things like clay, pieces of leaves,

decaying sticks and things like that.

But the particles are also things like bacteria.

So we want to make sure that we remove these particles

in treatment.

To remove the particles,

both treatment plants use a coagulant

that helps particles stick together.

These bigger and heavier globs eventually sink to the bottom.

We end up with a water that's about like this.

So we actually remove about 90 to 95%

of the solids in the water just through that process.

To remove additional solids and bacteria,

the water moves through filtration beds,

containing materials like sand.

Flint's beds are smaller than Cincinnati's,

but function much the same way.

As the water trickles through the sand,

the sand will remove the rest of the particulates,

the rest of the pathogens that could be left in the water.

So then, when we come out of the sand filters,

that water looks very clear, very clean.

The water might look clean,

but coming from an industrialized river,

it may still carry invisible toxins.

There are chemical manufacturers

all up and down the river,

and some of that material can get into the water.

To remove these,

many cities use carbon filtration,

similar to the charcoal

in an aquarium or in a home water filter.

At the end, finishing chemicals

like fluoride and chlorine are added.

As a rule,

river water is more difficult to treat than lake water.

River waters are just a big engineering challenge,

relative to a lake water source.

Rainwater, snow melt,

runoff that goes into the river from agricultural sources.

You can get road salts.

River waters change very rapidly,

and so the entire treatment plant

has to be geared to respond

within literally minutes to hours

of big changes in chemistry.

Complex chemistry

and a plant that hadn't been fully operational in 50 years...

Was Flint in over its head from the start?

Within a few months of the switch,

not only are residents complaining of rashes

and bad smells...

Now, back in Flint, some folks are dealing

with a new problem.

...but the city is issuing public health warnings.

...bacteria that prompted

a boil water advisory since Friday.

Water needs to be boiled to kill off any bacteria.

E. coli bacteria,

a potentially dangerous pathogen that originates in fecal matter,

is found in Flint's water.

To kill E. coli,

Flint adds more and more chlorine.

We use it for household cleaning and swimming pools,

but over-chlorinated water can react with organic matter

and create toxic byproducts.

This starts to happen in Flint.

In October, another red flag.

Concerns over water quality in Flint

are leading Genesee County's biggest employer

to shut off their taps.

General Motors reports that Flint River water.

Is corroding its engine parts.

The issue here is the levels of chlorine in the water.

It creates some sort of corrosion.

GM switches back to Detroit water on its own.