When Dionna Brown entered high school as freshman in Flint, Michigan, in 2014, she wasn’t initially aware of the city’s contaminated drinking water supply. Blemishes broke out on her skin, only to clear up once she started using bottled water to wash her face. It was months before she was informed about the real issue.
Flint’s public health crisis—caused by a series of government failures in 2014 to safely switch the source of the city’s water supply—exposed its residents to high levels of lead, a neurotoxin that impacts biological processes in childhood development. Though much of the youngest generation impacted has now grown up, they are still living with the aftermath all while seeking justice a decade later.
For Brown, she now navigates her own cognitive and behavioral difficulties that she believes came from elevated lead levels. And throughout the years, she’s watched health complications persist in the people around her, like her grandmother.
“My life changed when my grandmother passed,” said Brown, a graduate student at Detroit’s Wayne State University and the youth environmental justice griots program director at the civil rights organization Black Millennials 4 Flint.
“I did the research and was like, oh my god, my grandmother had high levels of lead in her blood, and this could have caused her chronic kidney disease, and I just put everything together,” she said.
Brown isn’t the only one who is still connecting the dots. Lawyers from environmental defense groups, scientists from universities, and activists who call Flint home have exhaustively put in the work to understand what happened, how to fix ongoing issues, and how to keep it from happening again. Even one of Michigan’s top legal chiefs committed her office to an investigation in the pursuit of holding government leaders criminally responsible for their actions. But justice didn’t come to fruition.
In October, the Michigan Supreme Court refused to hear appeals of a lower court’s decision to dismiss misdemeanor charges against former Michigan Gov. Richard Snyder, closing prosecutions on the preventable man-made crisis that sickened an entire community of people. Now, the same people feel like they are experiencing another cycle of institutional dysfunction as they wait for the attorney general’s office to release a public report on the attempted prosecutions in the coming year.
“It was a slap in the face,” Brown said. “Especially with Synder not being held accountable for his actions, causing harm to a whole population, a whole community of people were majority Black in poverty. There’s so many layers.”
The court system “failed us tremendously”
In 2011, Flint fell under state control because of a multimillion-dollar deficit. Then-Gov. Synder appointed an emergency manager to cut costs, eventually leading to switching the city’s water source from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River—a waterway known to have been polluted with raw sewage and toxins from leaching landfills.
As people saw caramel-colored water run from their taps, government leaders told them the water was safe. In reality, insufficient water treatment was corroding the city’s aging lead pipes, leaching the heavy metal into water as people drew water from their faucets. Water droplets with bacteria also went airborne into numerous homes, such as where Florlisa Fowler lives. She and her family survived, but 12 other people who were similarly exposed died from Legionnaires’ disease.
“I’m not a seasoned activist, but I got involved because I had no other choice at the time,” said Fowler, who’s been involved in the community-driven advocacy work credited with spurring government action.
“We were begging that man [Snyder] to switch us back [to the original water source],” she said. “And he refused until he was held accountable by doctors and scientists, and when it started blowing up nationally, that’s when he stepped down and turned us back to the Detroit water temporarily.”
In the absence of the Environmental Protection Agency and Snyder’s administration, Virginia Tech researchers stepped in and collected samples that found that lead levels had spiked well over the federal threshold for safe water. It then took a lawsuit in 2016 from the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan to get Flint residents access to clean water, and the next year they won a settlement that required the city to replace lead pipes with state funding.
For Fowler, at that point, the damage was already done, and she turned to the journey for justice, sitting in on courtroom proceedings and testimonies under then-Solicitor General Fadwa Hammoud and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy’s criminal investigation into the Flint water crisis.
The Flint Water Prosecution Team indicted nine key players on 42 counts ranging from misconduct to perjury, including Gov. Snyder, who received two misdemeanor charges of willful neglect. But over the years, various courts dismissed the charges and subsequent appeals until the prosecution team closed the investigation entirely this year, writing in a public statement that their “disappointment in the Michigan Supreme Court is exceeded only by our sorrow for the people of Flint.”
Attorney General Dana Nessel herself was not involved operationally with the prosecution because she focused her efforts on civil litigation that resulted in a $626.25 million settlement for the people of Flint in 2021, according to her office. But critics of the settlement say that the $626.5 million will only go so far for the people of Flint. Fowler calls it the bare minimum for families, and especially young people, who may be dealing with lifelong health problems.
“We still have active problems that are going on,” she said. “There are some who are still holding out hope, but a lot of us have come to grips to realize we are not going to see justice in the courtroom. The American justice system that involves the courts has failed us tremendously. Once again.”
Pieces of litigation still remain and will likely roll into 2024, specifically in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. This November, the National Defense Resource Council and co-plaintiffs, including Flint residents and pastors, filed a motion to submit additional evidence in a case against the city; that motion claims that the city has violated the 2017 settlement to replace lead pipes. According to the City of Flint’s progress report on water, 97% of lead and galvanized steel water lines have been replaced, but the contempt motion is an attempt to push the city to finish the job and restore property damaged by repairs.
A case for restorative justice
In addition to the ongoing physical health outcomes people experience to this day, many in Flint are also dealing with the downstream effects of being betrayed by their government. That impacts mental well-being, such as anxiety and other emotional distress.
“Whenever there is a dramatic shift in expectation, based off a particular experience or exposure, that is a traumatic experience,” said Jerel Ezell, an assistant professor in community health sciences at University of California, Berkeley. The water crisis brought his academic research back to his hometown of Flint, where his family still lives.
“The downstream impacts are going to be less trust of the government, which is already the issue in Flint,” he said.
That means, even though the city has complied with safe water quality lead standards for the last six years, people still may not trust it because of the past. In addition to Ezell’s studies, political scientists and economists have linked unreliable public water and low civic engagement, such as voting for people who may better advocate for community needs.
Further perpetuating the cycle of mistrust, Ezell said that not having accountability under a punishment-based justice system for an interceptable disaster like in Flint is a breach of what many consider a social contract. While prosecutions in Flint could have set a new precedent in environmental justice cases, the failure is indicative that the current court system is not working when it comes to disasters like wide-scale drinking water contamination.
“This is where there’s a really fascinating intersection of restorative justice,” Ezell said. “Restorative justice says, instead of taking the punitive approach, let’s have a discussion, and let’s figure this out collectively.”
That would mean the people in power would sit down with people in the community and hear what those harmed need to move forward with their lives. The government would then provide extended public resources, even if it meant lifetime support. This reimagining of the justice system will take the work of the succeeding era of emerging policymakers and lawyers, such as Brown.
Like many in her generation who grew up with environmental injustices, they are now also facing more consequences they didn’t create. Water crises continue to unfold in other cities, and this time the climate crisis is layered onto it. As a leader in climate justice, Brown is motivated to be a part of systemic change because she knows communities like Flint will repeatedly be on the front lines.
“I do believe the system is working as it is intended to work, and it’s benefiting the people that it is supposed to benefit,” Brown said. “We need to dismantle the system and build a new one, so it can be equitable for everyone.”