Clean water is a human right everybody should have.
We need to make sure that the water is clean and safe for people to drink.
Benton Harbor, Michigan is in crisis.
The community’s water is not safe to drink because it contains potentially toxic amounts of lead.
Citizens are relying on bottled water for their daily needs.
Residents complained for years about the safety of the water, but no action was taken.
Reverend Edward Pinkney is the president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council.
You can’t drink the water. You can’t brush your teeth with the water.
You can’t cook with the water and you can't make baby formula with the water.
Nestled on the western shores of Lake Michigan, this small town is living the
same environmental nightmare as the much more publicized one in Flint, 150 miles to the east.
It's a community with less than 10,000 people, just a little less than ten thousand, 85 to
90% of African Americans, that's why there was really no action.
The Benton Harbor Community Water Council felt that we had to do something.
So we got with a group of people and we explained the situation to them
here in the city of Benton Harbor,
and we all got together and said that we was going to file a petition
to the EPA to get some action done.
And that's how everything came about.
And here's the thing that's so important here, if we had not filed a petition,
The people here would still be drinking contaminated water.
The Benton Harbor Community Water Council’s petition calls for the EPA
to secure a source of safe drinking water for Benton Harbor.
Lead contamination has disastrous, long- term effects on the health of a community.
It can cause heart and kidney damage in adults and could cause developmental delays in children.
The damage is just too great for one to even imagine.
And it's been downplayed for so long, that people really don't get it.
The petition also calls for the community to replace the lead
service lines running into Benton Harbor’s homes.
But first they have to be found.
One of the challenges with locating lead service lines and replacing them
is many communities do not have accurate records about how many lead service lines there are
or which homes have lead service lines and which ones don't.
Ian Robinson is the president of BlueConduit, an Ann Arbor Michigan based company
that has developed an algorithm to help communities locate their lead service lines.
BlueConduit’s algorithm was developed during the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan,
and is now being used in fifty communities across the country.
So the way that it works is it identifies patterns and relationships
among homes that have a known lead service line or a known copper service line,
and then generates predictions based on that
for homes where there is not a known or verified service line material.
Cities have information about the age of the home, home values, zoning … age of construction,
and then also information about the water infrastructure.
We've also found that sometimes the age of the nearest fire hydrant to a home
is often predictive of the service line material.
And so we take all of that information, and then we train a predictive model using
information that is known about service lines in the area.
The predictions are improved over time so that there's
increased certainty as the project moves forward.
Homes where sampling shows the highest amount of lead in the
water are prioritized for lead line replacement.
Because the order matters, we're in a situation in Benton Harbor where there
is a public health emergency.
And so each additional day that residents are living with the risk of having a lead service line
is increasing their risk of exposure to lead.
The State of Michigan has set a spring,
2023 deadline to replace all of the lead service lines in Benton Harbor.
We only have 6,000 pipelines, we should be able to complete this
in six months. You know, if you are serious about getting Benton Harbor clean, safe water.
The use of filters in homes and the addition of lead corrosion controls to Benton Harbor’s
water system have helped to reduce the amount of lead in Benton Harbor’s water,
but residents are still advised to use bottled water.