Distant lab team sounded alarm for Flint residents
BLACKSBURG, Va. — The young scientists, mostly in their 20s and counting the semesters until their next degree, had drawn an audience so large it spilled from the auditorium on the Virginia Tech campus into two overflow rooms.
They were explaining to students, members of the faculty and guests how they were at first laughed off by government regulators about 550 miles northwest of here in Flint, Mich., when they detected alarming amounts of lead coming from residents’ taps.
Siddhartha Roy, a doctoral student from India, held up a bottle of yellow-tinted Flint water. The team’s role, he told the crowd, was “essentially validating what citizens had been saying for months.” That validation was so important to the increasingly desperate people of Flint that one resident hugged him when he heard the Virginia Tech scientists had indeed confirmed that the water was contaminated.
“He just wouldn’t let go,” Roy, 27, said in an interview. “It’s surreal, because when it’s happening, your mind is blank. But when you go back home and you reflect on it, you feel happy and grateful that you can be part of something big.”
Flint’s public health problem stemmed from a failure to properly treat water from the Flint River, which resulted in pipe corrosion and elevated levels of lead. The crisis is at best a tale of neglect and incompetence. At worst, critics say, it is criminal conduct that imperiled the public’s well-being. Already state and federal agencies, including the FBI, have opened investigations.
But as government officials were ignoring and ridiculing residents’ concerns about the safety of their tap water, a small circle of people was setting off alarms. Among them was the team from Virginia Tech.
The team began looking into Flint’s water after its professor, Marc Edwards, spoke with LeeAnne Walters, a resident whose tap water contained alarming amounts of lead. Edwards, who years earlier had helped expose lead contamination in Washington, D.C., had his students send testing kits to homes in Flint to find out if the problem was widespread. Lead exposure can lead to health and developmental problems, particularly in children, and its toxic effects can be irreversible.
Their persistence helped force officials to acknowledge the crisis and prompted warnings to residents to not drink or cook with tap water. Officials are now scrambling to find a more permanent solution to the problem than trucking in thousands of plastic jugs, and are turning to Virginia Tech for advice.
The scientists “became the only people that citizens here trust, and it’s still that way,” said Melissa Mays, a Flint resident who has protested the water quality.
At Virginia Tech, which experienced the nation’s deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in 2007 and last weekend saw two students arrested in the murder of a 13-year-old girl, the researchers are a source of pride. At the presentation on campus on Jan. 28, they were interrupted several times by standing ovations.
The team is a mixed group. Mostly environmental engineers, the members range in experience from undergraduates to professors.
The students come from places as disparate as Arizona, Virginia, India and Singapore. Many said they had known little about Michigan, let alone Flint, before they started their research, spending nights and weekends working on the project.
Several of them were drawn to environmental engineering, Roy said, because “we have this childhood aspiration of hopefully helping people and serving society at some point.”