You're just vigilant every day. You shouldn't have to be
vigilant for years and years and years and years and
years and years. Mcculla and her seven year old son,
Robbie are still dealing with the aftermath of a crisis
in Flint that exposed its 100,000 residents to toxic
levels of lead in the drinking water. I think people
just automatically assume that should be ok. Now, I
did, I thought it was fixed. Most people do all these
years later. AA still uses bottled water to wash her
food and feed her cats. Robbie has brushed his teeth
with bottled water his entire life. They're doing that
because the city has still not fulfilled its promise to
inspect the water pipes coming into their home for lead.
They came and spray painted the pipeline and they put
little flags and then they left and they never did the
work. A Scripps news investigation discovered nearly
decade after the Flint water crisis. Efforts to remove
dangerous pipes have slowed to a crawl and thousands of
residents may still need their water pipes. Inspected
like a, how does that feel It feels like you have no
power no support. It feels like you don't matter, feels
like the world just keeps going on and you keep going
on. But like, yeah, like you don't matter. Like
everyone here is not important enough and it feels
awful. The problem started nine years ago in 2014 when
officials switched the source o the city's water in a
cost cutting move to the highly polluted Flint River
Its corrosive water caused underground pipes to begin
leaching toxic amounts of lead into Flint's drinking
water. As part of a settlement with Flint residen
the city was required to find and replace every lead
water line. The court order deadline for the entire
project was January of 2020 more than three years ago.
Just this past February, a federal judge determined the
city has violated and is violating the settlement
agreement and concluded it has not done what it has
promised to do and all along the city could have tappe
further into $100 million in state and federal funds
set aside in that settlement for Flint to get the let
out. But our Scripps news investigation found that t
pace of inspections has dropped more than 95% from a
peak in 2018. What is taking so long We will not rush
through this process just to say that we got it done
under Mayor Sheldon Neely's watch. The city of Flint
has missed three court deadline to finish the job. He
blamed the first two on delays caused by the previous
mayor and the pandemic which initially did slow down
work for much of the nation. We pressed him on the most
recent miss and then there was another deadline afte
the pandemic started and that was in September of 2022.
You got the data in front of you. Deadlines were se
and deadlines were missed. I admit to that, right. Some,
some uh could be contributed to me and some could be
contributed to other pieces right early in his term,
Mayor Neely's own administration cited the histor
lack of proper record keeping for the city's failure to
get the job done. But three years later, we discovere
the city still does not know where its own contractors
have carried out much of the work. Does the city know
where work has been done In many cases, we're, we're
evaluating that today. So what's the number overall
that needs to still be completed Well, those number
are, you know, sive to say, you know, I don't wanna be,
uh, nailed down to actually giving a particular nu
How do you go down the punch list of homes that you
have to complete or homes that you have to visit If
right here as you and I are talking, you don't seem to
know how many more there are to go and you want me to
give you a number 3000, 3000, 5000. I give you
percentages more than 90% of this process has been
completed. That's a number he repeated over and over
again. No matter how hard we tried to pin him down,
we're gonna stick with the number of more than 90%. But
Scripps news discovered more than 90% complete is also
exactly where the city said it stood in this press
release from August of 2020 nearly three years ago.
Flint is being left behind again and that cannot happen.
Addie Rick is an attorney for the Natural Resour
Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group th
helped win the legal settlement on behalf of Flint's
residents. It's still not fixed. The city has
mismanaged this program for years and we found health
risks are once again growing lead in Flint's drinkin
water dropped to its lowest level in 2021. But the most
recent tests showed levels triple that amount still
just below the threshold for action by the EPA but
trending in the wrong direction, nine parts per billi
which is high. Our goal is to get the lead pipes out.
But when we visited Flint, we found crews on the street
nine years into this crisis, searching only now for
dangerous water pipes at people's homes and finding
them a project that was very easy to begin is, is more
challenging to complete because we're still searching
out a lot of those lines and trying to find and locate
all of them the reason why really, I'm pressing a
little bit here today is that there are real people who
are, are waiting for help and have been calling the
city saying please come to my house, please check my
pipe. Yeah, but that's not a statement of fact. Mark, I
can't accept that as a statement of fact, we shared
seven different stories of Flint residents with the
mayor, including Aa mccullough who all told us that
they tried to get city contractors out to their homes
but are still waiting. Nine years later, the mayor had
trouble believing that if they're calling here, we have
health navigators going door to door. The city hall is
open every day. Our phone lines are active and open and
operational. But the day we sat down with the mayor,
here's what happened when we called the city's get the
let out number for residents. Mailbox is not avail
at this time. Thank you. Can you put your head up just
a little bit buddy There we go. Thank you. Days later,
the city told us it put a work order in for Aa's home.
But life on the front lines of this crisis has broken
Aa's trust in the city of Flint. Something that
shouldn't have happened should have been fixed
immediately and we shouldn't still be here years later
trying to prove that it's not fixed.