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The message was pretty clear at the Rachel Maddow’s town hall meeting in Flint on Wednesday night: Residents and politicians see the state and Gov. Rick Snyder as the villains while the ultimate solution – replacing all the lead water pipes -- is far more complicated than some would care to admit.
Politically, even Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who sat on one of the panels during the hour-long show broadcast on MSNBC, sharply criticized state government, though she stopped short of mentioning Snyder by name.
“I don’t trust anything the state says right now,” she said, echoing sentiments that run deep in Flint.
Interestingly, while all the panelists want fixes quickly, not everyone agreed on how fast pipes should be replaced.
Master plumber Harold Harrington of Flint, said he could get 1,000 plumbers to come to Flint in a couple weeks and start replacing pipes if somebody would just say “go.” He said it would cost about $10,000 per house to fix.
Maddow noted that Gov. Snyder had said the replacement of the pipes is a job for the long haul. In other words, not any time soon. Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, who was sitting on a panel, responded: " It doesn’t sit very well with me. Because we need that to happen right now. We know we need those lead service lines to be replaced immediately. “
But environmental engineer Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who became one of the heroes of the Flint crisis after he tested water samples and found dangerous lead levels, thinks replacing all the pipes is not as simple as getting the money and starting the work. He's been appointed by the governor to sit on a committee to address the crisis.
Edwards said the first step is to make the current system safe by “coating pipes” through "optimized corrosion control," and then testing water to make sure it's safe to drink. Water is no longer coming from the Flint River, but rather the Detroit water system. Still, the water is not considered safe to drink because of the damage the Flint River water caused.
Longer term, Edwards said, "we have to figure out, not just in Flint, but around the U.S., we have to figure out a way to get these pipes replaced. What we’re struggling with right now is, there's really no precedent for this kind of man-made disaster. And we don’t have a good road map to follow to replace these pipes and do it right. We could jump into this and actually do it wrong. Other cities have done it wrong and made the problem worse in the past. So we have to work with the EPA."
"The hurdles that we face are the records are so poor, not only in Flint, but all around the U.S. We don't know where these lead pipes are. The records we have are often times wrong. So simply identifying which homes have the lead pipes is a monumental task."
University of Michigan-Flint Professor Martin Kaufman, who sat on the panel, said he was working on mapping out which homes have those pipes. It's estimated that there could be about 25,000 homes that need new pipes.
The theme throughout was that the state is at fault, and Maddow raised one of her favorite Michigan subjects: Emergency managers. She's been vocal in her opposition of EMs on her show over many months. Many blame the emergency managers for switching from the Detroit water system to the Flint River, which produced the problem.
Snyder has tried to point out that the Flint City Council voted 7-1 to make the switch to the Flint River. But Maddow says the council has no real control since the emergency manager can override any vote.
"It is true that government failed the city of Flint, Michigan," Maddow said. "But local leaders in Flint were not actually at fault because local leaders were replaced in Flint by emergency managers who ran the city on their own say-so and who reported only to the governor and not the voters of the city."
Maddow then asked if part of the solution was to get rid of emergency managers. Mayor Weaver said: "Democracy needs to be restored in Flint. That’s what happened. That’s how we got here. We didn’t have a voice. It was taken."
