Flint Switched Its Water Supply to Save Money. The Corrosion Control It Skipped Cost $100 a Day.

On April 25, 2014, Flint, Michigan switched its drinking water source from Lake Huron, piped in by Detroit's water system, to the Flint River, treated at a local plant the city hadn't run as a full-time water source in decades. State regulators did not require the addition of corrosion-control chemicals, treatment that would have cost an estimated $80 to $100 a day. Within weeks, residents were reporting brown water. It took eighteen months for the state to admit the water was poisoning children.

Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager at the time, installed under a Michigan law that suspended the elected city council's authority to save money. The water switch was itself a cost-cutting measure. The corrosion-control treatment that could have prevented most of what followed cost less per day than a tank of gas.

A $100-a-Day Chemical Nobody Added

Lead service lines and lead-soldered pipes are common in old industrial cities like Flint, and normally a thin mineral coating, built up over years by properly treated water, keeps that lead from leaching into what comes out of the tap. Flint River water is more corrosive than the Lake Huron supply it replaced, and federal rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act's Lead and Copper Rule require corrosion-control treatment when a water source changes in ways that could increase corrosivity.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) did not require Flint to add it, later claiming a misreading of the federal rule that treatment could wait for a study period. Without the protective coating, the Flint River water stripped lead directly from the pipes into residents' tap water for the full eighteen months the city stayed on that source.

The People Who Said So First

• Summer 2015: EPA regional water expert Miguel Del Toral circulates an internal memo warning that Flint has no corrosion control and that a resident's home tested at nearly 400 times the EPA's action level for lead. His superiors, including EPA Region 5 administrator Susan Hedman, do not make the memo public.
• September 2015: Virginia Tech engineering professor Marc Edwards, invited by a Flint resident and working independently of the state, publishes testing showing the city's water was, on average, far more corrosive and lead-contaminated than MDEQ's own sampling had found — sampling later shown to have used techniques that minimized detected lead levels.
• September 24, 2015: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at Flint's Hurley Medical Center, publicly releases research showing the share of Flint children with elevated blood-lead levels had nearly doubled citywide, and roughly tripled in some ZIP codes, since the switch.
• Throughout 2014–2015: MDEQ spokesperson Brad Wurfel publicly dismisses the outside findings, telling reporters that anyone suggesting the water wasn't safe was "blowing off steam."

The Switch Back

Flint reconnected to Detroit's water system on October 16, 2015, roughly three weeks after Hanna-Attisha's findings went public and eighteen months after the switch to the Flint River. Governor Rick Snyder said publicly that he had not learned the water contained dangerous lead levels until that October, and issued a formal apology to Flint residents on December 29, 2015. Susan Hedman resigned from the EPA effective February 1, 2016, saying in her resignation letter that "this tragedy happened on my watch" while also disputing that her office had acted improperly.

Reconnecting to Detroit's system did not immediately fix the damage. The corrosive Flint River water had already stripped the protective coating from lead pipes throughout the system, and lead levels in some homes remained elevated for years afterward as that coating slowly rebuilt.

The Deaths Nobody Connected at First

Separately from the lead contamination, Genesee County recorded an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease, a severe bacterial pneumonia, beginning in the summer of 2014, shortly after the water switch. At least 12 people died and dozens more were sickened in an outbreak state officials would later be accused of failing to disclose promptly to the public, even after internal discussions flagged a possible link to the water switch. Prosecutors later argued that earlier public warning could have let residents avoid using the water for bathing and other purposes tied to Legionella's spread.

The Charges

• 2016–2017: Then-Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette's office charges 15 current and former city and state officials, including Michigan Department of Health and Human Services director Nick Lyon and chief medical executive Eden Wells, with crimes ranging from misconduct in office to involuntary manslaughter tied to the Legionnaires' deaths.
• June 2019: Michigan's new attorney general, Dana Nessel, drops all pending charges from the Schuette-era prosecutions, saying the original investigation had been rushed and incomplete, while stating the case would be reinvestigated from scratch.
• January 2021: A new round of charges, obtained through a since-discredited "one-person grand jury" procedure, indicts nine people, including former Governor Rick Snyder (two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty) and, again, Lyon and Wells (felony involuntary manslaughter counts tied to the Legionnaires' deaths).
• June 28, 2022: The Michigan Supreme Court rules that the one-person grand jury procedure used to bring the 2021 indictments was invalid under Michigan law, because indictments are supposed to come from a prosecutor's complaint or a multi-person grand jury, not a single judge acting alone.
• October 2022–2023: Lower courts formally dismiss the remaining charges against Lyon, Wells, and the other officials on the same procedural grounds. Snyder's misdemeanor charges are dismissed in December 2022; the Michigan Supreme Court declines to revive any of the cases in October 2023.

No official was ever convicted of a crime connected to the water switch, the lead contamination, or the Legionnaires' deaths. Every case that reached the prosecution stage was dismissed for how it was brought, not on the facts underlying it.

The Money

In November 2021, a federal judge gave preliminary approval to a $626 million civil settlement resolving claims from Flint residents against the state of Michigan, the city, Michigan State University's extension program, and McLaren Regional Medical Center, with the state of Michigan responsible for the large majority of the total. The settlement, one of the largest in Michigan history, allocated roughly 80 percent of the funds to claims involving children, reflecting the outsized harm of lead exposure to developing brains. The first payments to the families of the twelve Legionnaires' victims began going out in 2025, more than a decade after the outbreak began.

The corrosion-control treatment Flint didn't get in 2014 would have cost the city, by the state's own later estimate, around $100 a day. The Legionnaires' outbreak alone killed 12 people. The lead exposure was measured in the blood of thousands of children who had no say in the emergency manager's budget. Nobody who made the decisions was ever convicted of anything, and the money that eventually went to residents came not from the officials who dismissed their complaints as steam-blowing, but from the state treasury they already paid into.

Filed from public reporting:

• Britannica — Flint Water Crisis: Summary, Facts, Governor, & Criminal Charges
• Environmental Science & Technology — Flint Water Crisis Caused By Interrupted Corrosion Control
• CBS News — Flint Water Crisis Started With the Flip of a Switch
• ABC News — EPA Regional Administrator Resigns Amid Flint Water Crisis
• The Detroit News — Darnell Earley: The Man in Power During Flint Switch
• TIME — Flint Emergency Managers Criminally Charged in the City's Water Crisis
• The Detroit News — Criminal Charges Dropped Against Lyon, 7 Others in Flint Water Scandal
• The Washington Post — Flint Water Charges Invalid, Michigan Supreme Court Says
• CNN — Judge Dismisses Charges Against Top Former State Officials in Flint Water Crisis
• CNN — Flint Water Crisis: Criminal Charges Against Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to Be Dismissed
• The Hill — Michigan Supreme Court Declines to Revive Flint Water Crisis Charges Against Ex-Governor
• Bridge Michigan — Michigan Judge Approves $626 Million Flint Water Crisis Settlement
• ABC12 — $626 Million Question Answered: Flint Water Settlement Checks Coming