Community members express skepticism of EPA decision to lift Flint drinking water emergency order

Yahoo

21-05-2025

Aonie GIlcreast raises questions about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision to lift the emergency order on the city's drinking water, as residents gather at Christ Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church on May 20, 2025. | Kyle Davidson
As Flint residents continue to push for accountability and clean water more than a decade since the start of the city's water crisis, attorneys from the ACLU and the NRDC gathered with community advocates at Christ Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church Tuesday night to honor the residents who pushed the city to complete its lead line replacement program.
However, the end of the program does not mean the city's pipes are lead free, and with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Monday decision lifting the emergency order placed on the city's drinking water, Pastor Allen Overton of Concerned Pastors for Social Action said the hosts were conscious of how they used the word celebrate.
'We're here today to celebrate a huge milestone in the case that we brought back in 2016 against the city of Flint and the state of Michigan officials. After more than eight years, the court ordered lead pipe replacement program has been completed, with nearly 11,000 lead pipes removed. That should be the point,' Overton said.
While this milestone is not all of the justice the community deserves, it is a huge achievement, he said.
'This community has been through so much. We were misled by our leaders. We had to take matters into our own hands by collecting water samples, educating ourselves about lead contamination and ultimately suing to force the government to fix the problem that they created. Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, the Natural Resource Defense Council and the ACLU, we are finally at the end of this project,' Overton said.
In April of 2014, the City of Flint switched its water source from Detroit-supplied Lake Huron water to the Flint River but failed to properly treat the water with corrosion control, corroding the pipes and leaching lead into the city's water. Failure to treat the water with proper levels of chlorine also led to outbreaks of Legionnaires' Disease, killing 12 and sickening at least 87 people between June 2014 and October 2015.
In March 2016, Flint resident Melissa Mays, alongside the NRDC, the ACLU of Michigan, the NRDC and Concerned Pastors for Social Action filed a suit in federal court to compel the city and the state to comply with federal testing and treatment requirements for lead and to replace all lead pipes within the city. That November, federal judge David M. Lawson ordered city and state officials to provide residents with either a faucet filter or regular door-to-door deliveries of bottled water.
In March 2017, residents secured a settlement agreement with Flint and the state of Michigan, promising to replace all lead lines within the city. While the initial deadline for replacing the lines was set for early 2020, residents repeatedly found themselves back in court, with Lawson in 2024 finding the city in contempt of a previous court order requiring the city to meet certain milestones in replacing lead pipes.
After replacing nearly 11,000 lead lines, ACLU of Michigan Acting Legal Director Bonsitu Kitaba said the city has nearly completed its obligations for the settlement. However, it has not replaced every lead line in the city, with several hundreds of pipes left to replace in vacant homes and some residents declining to have their home checked or their pipes replaced, Kitaba said.
The city is required by law to replace all lead lines in the coming years, with the city committing to replacing any remaining lead lines this year, Kitaba said, encouraging any residents who need their lead lines replaced to call 810-410-1133, or email [e-mail]
Addie Rolnick, an attorney with the NRDC noted that the settlement requirements will remain until March 2026, meaning the city must continue providing filter cartridges and water test kits until then. After the settlement concludes, the city will still be required to replace all lead pipes and must monitor lead levels in the water and keep them below the state's 12 part per billion threshold under the Michigan Lead and Copper rule.
While taking questions from community members, Rolnick emphasized that there is no safe level of lead in the drinking water, encouraging residents to continue using EPA-certified filters.
As long as there is lead attached to the system, it will continue to impact pipes throughout the city, Mays said.
While Mays, Overton and members of the NRDC and ACLU answered resident's questions, Aonie Gilcreast, 74, said residents were getting mixed messages about their water with the EPA's latest announcement.
'Collectively, we don't really know what to believe. We don't trust the system,' he said.
While Overton clarified that the agency still held some concerns, that issue was a fight for the next day.
'If there's a problem with the EPA and the decision that the EPA has made, then we need to have a conversation with them offline to find out what it is that we can do, if there's something that we can do,' Overton later told attendees, emphasizing that that work would be driven by community members and their relationship with the attorneys.
Overton later told the Michigan Advance that they had some concerns about the EPA's decision, agreeing with the NRDC that residents should continue to use filters as long as there's any level of lead in the system.
'Because we do have lead that still remains in our system, it would be destructive to tell people that we don't need the filters anymore. So we're going to begin that fight to find out exactly what is going on with that, to make sure that we keep things above board, that our residents are protected [and] taken care of,' Overton said.
'We've been bamboozled by the EPA as well as EGLE. So we want to make sure that what they're saying are the facts, they have the documentation that they've done, all the checklists are checked off, everything's been checked off to make sure that what they're saying is correct and it's best for this community,' he said.
Mays additionally raised concerns about President Donald Trump and his administration's efforts to roll back environmental regulations, including a potential roll back of requirements for all the lead pipes in the nation to be replaced over the next 13 years, accompanied by lower limits for lead in drinking water.
'Flint is an example of right now what's happening in the country. We have people trying to run government as a business, and who are appointing unelected, uneducated people like Elon Musk and [the Department of Government Efficiency] to go in and gut all these regulations,' said Mays, who likened the government initiative's cost-based decision making to the decisions made by Flint's emergency manager, ultimately sparking the water crisis.
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