Months after the spotlight of the national media had moved on from Flint, Mich., Undark writer Steve Friess moved in. Throughout the spring and early summer of 2016, Friess anchored his reporting in the comings and goings Gina Luster, a 42-year-old single mother, and her 8-year-old daughter, Kennedy. Both mother and daughter had been severely poisoned by lead following a switch in the municipal water supply and inadequate treatment of the new source: the polluted Flint River. The culmination of Friess’s reporting — which included spending nearly a month, all told, living with the Lusters, attending community meetings, and interviewing recovery officials, doctors, plant managers, and local and state leaders — was a portrait of a community failed by everyone but, perhaps most tellingly, by science.
Most Americans assume that public health and infrastructure experts long ago developed a keen understanding of how to ensure drinking water is safe, and that the miles of pipes that deliver it are not incubating disease or poison. But as Friess reveals in scrupulous detail, on these and myriad other aspects of municipal drinking water systems, we remain breathtakingly ignorant.
The piece is a journey into the modern lives of people in a major American city who still cannot have confidence in their drinking water and whose new, entrenched mistrust — bred by years of being dismissed and lied to by officials — is itself a new public health risk.
Many times health stories detail the startling things science is learning. What makes this piece so important is that it sheds light on the shocking number of things health experts and scientists still do not fully understand — even as most Americans assume they do.