Flint’s Never-Ending Water Crisis and ‘Punishment Nightmare’ (2024)

Yesterday, Veolia—a water, energy, and waste management multinational corporation—held its general shareholders meeting at the Maison de la Mutualité on the Left Bank in Paris. The French company is the globe’s largest private drinking water supplier. Its U.S. portfolio is certain to cheer its investors, with operations doubling in size over the past five years for revenues of $5.4 billion in 2023.

In its “Deep Dive: Veolia in the U.S.” overview published last week, the company says that its goal is to “support U.S. industrial and economic growth while preserving health and taking into account the planetary limits.” One key growth area for the company, which wants to double its size by 2030, is water quality issues prompted by an “unprecedented wave of regulations” regarding PFAS, lead, and copper. This “deep dive” is really a public relations salvo that doesn’t delve into any specifics about drinking water quality or the intricacies of U.S. lead regulations.

And though the document ticks off successes like removing micropollutants from drinking water in Bellmawr, New Jersey, the company offers no insights into its role in preserving the health of Flint, Michigan’s residents at the outset of the city’s water crisis in 2014—even though Veolia North America agreed to a $25 million settlement in February to avoid what was likely to be a high-profile second jury trial over its role as an adviser to Flint.

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“VNA stands by its work in Flint,” the company proclaimed in a press release about the agreement. Which makes the date of Veolia’s April convening a monument to tone deafness worthy of the ancien régime. It was exactly a decade ago, on April 25, 2014, that the financially strapped city, in an effort to save money, switched over its drinking water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The failure to properly treat the corrosive river water resulted in lead leaching out of old pipes into drinking water conveyed to homes and businesses.

Veolia was called in to provide engineering advice over a two-week period, and the class action suit alleged that the company failed to provide timely engineering recommendations about the drinking water that sickened Flint residents. Veolia maintains that political leaders and agency officials disregarded its counsel.

The optics of a multibillion-dollar multinational firm agreeing to a modest settlement, a blip on its balance sheet, with poor Michiganders, most of them Black, does little to take the sting out of years of poisoned water, illnesses, and death. “Flint residents deserve meaningful compensation,” says Neil Gupta, water campaign director for Corporate Accountability, a Boston-based social justice advocacy group. That level of long-overdue restitution amounts to something much less than contrition and more like disparagement, coming as it does from a fabulously wealthy corporation. As for Flint residents themselves, all it means is that they must move into the second decade of their slow-motion crisis.

The most egregious feature of the crisis is the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency to own up to its own abdication of responsibility and compensate residents. In 2017, Flint residents filed a lawsuit against the EPA alleging that it could have declared an emergency as early as the fall of 2014, when residents first complained about discoloration, smells, and other symptoms of toxicity. The plaintiffs also claim that the agency failed to undertake a prompt investigation or inform the public about the risks of water contamination.

The most egregious feature of the crisis is the failure of the Environmental Protection Agency to own up to its own abdication of responsibility and compensate residents.

Instead, the agency has tried and failed to have the case dismissed for the past seven years, including as recently as February, despite the fact that the agency did not issue an emergency order for testing and review until early 2016, prompting the EPA regional administrator to resign. The EPA inspector general later found that the agency could have issued an order seven months earlier.

Flint residents do have an avenue to state restitution, however, though it’s not been easy to come by. Michigan has devised an atypical and complex administrative review process to funnel those funds to them. In 2021, the state of Michigan agreed to a $625 million settlement, under which Flint children, certain adults, businesses, and water rate payers are eligible for payouts. USA Today/Detroit Free Press reported that the review process is ongoing with additional reconsiderations and appeals expected before disbursem*nts get under way.

U.S. District Judge Judith Levy admitted that though the situation is “frustrating,” it prevents money from “go[ing] to the wrong people.” Certain attorneys, however, requested earlier payouts and will receive tens of millions of dollars before Flint residents, some of whom have been waiting years to repair broken water heaters or toilets damaged by corrosion.

Former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who apologized for the debacle in his 2016 State of the State address, was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty. The charges against him were ultimately dismissed in 2023. (Eight other people escaped criminal charges in 2019.) After setting up a cybersecurity firm last year, Snyder has moved on to fundraising for Republicans seeking seats in the Michigan House.

The city of Flint itself came in for some pointed criticism in March by a federal judge, courtesy of a finding of civil contempt for its failure to meet outreach, reporting, and inspection deadlines set in 2017 to replace lead water service lines in the city. The order noted that many residents “still do not have access to safe tap water. Because the City has yet to replace all water service lines, residents still are advised by the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Michigan not to drink tap water unless a special filter has been installed.”

City officials blamed the delays on securing approvals for stipulations concerning informational door hangers and winter weather. Judge David Lawson was not persuaded but did not levy penalties due to the city’s financial stresses, particularly since city officials dealt with some other issues that had been raised while the case was pending. It was the sixth time in six years that the plaintiffs have sought to get the city to live up to the original agreement.

Melissa Mays, a Flint water activist, told The Detroit News that 2024 is shaping up to be a replay of 2014 and 2015. “Here we are, at ten years, nobody’s in jail, there’s no criminal cases,” she says. “This current city administration has done everything they could to get in the way to stop progress to get the last remaining lead service lines out, and they’re not doing anything to replace the [distribution] mains.”

“People’s plumbing, like ours, has been exploding in walls and causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage,” Mays continues. “Nobody’s received anything from the civil cases. Houses are falling down, people are living with broken sewer lines in their homes. And then [there are] water leaks, black mold. We’re having to just live in this ongoing punishment nightmare.”

Gabrielle Gurley

Prospect senior editor and award-winning journalist Gabrielle Gurley writes and edits work on states and cities, transportation and infrastructure, civil rights, and climate. Follow @gurleygg

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