60 minutes rewind you may remember the pictures from the water crisis five years ago in flint
michigan hundreds of angry residents holding up bottles of rust-colored water and demanding
answers months of protest were waived off by officials who denied anything was wrong
the turning point came when a local pediatrician found conclusive proof that the children of flint
were being exposed to high levels of lead in their water and prompted the state to declare an
emergency now that same doctor is working to solve a mystery that still worries parents in flint
what lasting damage did the water do to their kids tonight you will hear her initial findings
which she says are worse than she feared but we begin with the legacy of flint's water crisis
once a week hundreds of cars line up for bottled water at the greater holy temple church of god
in flint you know you're too old to be driving come on where's your sticker baby sandra jones
is in command she is a pastor's wife god bless with the voice of a four-star general let him go
don't talk to him come around me he's 90 take his number we're going to find a way to deliver to him
jones keeps the cars moving i almost got my toes
and the water coming each family is allowed four cases of water on this day they gave away
36 thousand bottles it just strikes me it's been five years and you're still doing this five years
and the thing about it is it's not lightening up i could see it if it was lightening up but it isn't
all right it is not the state stopped giving away bottled water two years ago because it said the
water is safe sandra jones relies on donations of water what's it been like it's been kind of hard
larry marshall was second in line the widowed father of four got here at five a.m he's been
waiting five hours for water water should be a basic necessity that we shouldn't have to wait
or stand in line for you know this is not a third world country but we're living like one
marshall like many in flint still refuses to drink tap water and if they come to you the
city or the state and they say you're drinking water safe are you going to believe them no they
lie so much and we know they lying i when they say something it's like uh talking to the wind
you know i don't believe nothing they say none of the politicians none of them flint wants a
prosperous hub of the american auto industry was nearly bankrupt back in 2014 officials
hope to save money by switching the city water source from the great lakes to the flint river
immediately residents began noticing something wasn't right
the water was rust colored and many people had rashes
but michigan's department of environmental quality and the city insisted the water in flint is safe
later a state investigation found those officials hid the fact that the river
water was not treated with chemicals that would prevent the pipes from corroding so for months
the water ate away at flint's old pipes releasing lead into residents tap water
they were poisoned i mean they were poisoned by this water they were all exposed to toxic water
dr mona hannah attisha is a pediatrician in flint who her patients call dr mona
see how strong kids are dr mona is a bit of a superhero herself here because she was the
first to link the water to high levels of lead in the children of flint so within a few months
of being on this water general motors which was born in flint and still has plants in flint
notice that this water our drinking water was corroding their engine parts let's just pause
like the drinking water was corroding engine parts so they were allowed to go back to great lakes
water didn't anybody at that point say if it's corroding an engine maybe this shouldn't be going
into our bodies into our kids i mean that should have been like fire alarm bells like red flags
so what did it take before your your eyes opened about this yeah it was the word lead
because the word lead when you're a physician or a pediatrician signals what in your brain there
is no safe level of lead we're never supposed to expose a population or a child to lead because
we can't do much about it it is an irreversible neurotoxin it attacks the core of what it means to
be you and impacts cognition how children think actually drops iq levels it impacts behavior
leading to things like developmental delays and it has these life altering consequences
in 2015 dr mona and a colleague started digging through blood test records of 1700 flint children
including the kids she sees at the hurley children's clinic ready the non-profit clinic
serves most of flint's kids the city is 53 black and has one of the highest poverty rates in the
country so we looked at the children's blood levels before the water switch we compared them
to children's blood levels after the water switch and in the areas where the water lead levels were
the highest in those parts of the city we saw the greatest increase in children's lead levels
armed with the first medical evidence the kids were being exposed to lead from the water dr
mona did something controversial she quickly held a press conference to share the blood test study
before other doctors reviewed her work so it was a bit of an academic no-no kind of a form of
academic disobedience but you knew that i i knew that but like but there was no choice there was no
way i was going to wait to have this this research vetted two weeks later michigan governor rick
snyder ordered the water switch back to the great lakes and declared a state of emergency i say
tonight as i have before i am sorry and i will fix it but the damage was done dr mona estimates 14
thousand kids in flint under the age of six may have been exposed to lead in their water
i never should have had to do the research that literally used the blood
of our children as detectors of environmental contamination three years after the crisis began
the percentage of third graders in flint who passed michigan's standardized literacy test
dropped from 41 percent to 10 percent i'm very concerned about my children and not only my
children but i'm concerned about the children of flint kenyatta dotson is still fearful of
the water even though the state is spending more than 300 million dollars to fix the water system
the city promised to replace all 12 000 supply lines that may have been contaminated with lead
by last fall now they say the work won't be done until summer dotson says she and
her daughters will continue to use bottled water for cooking and brushing their teeth i need time
to come back to a place where i feel whole again you don't feel whole right now oh no would this
have happened in a rich white suburb maybe it would have happened in in a rich white suburb
would it have continued for as long as it has i don't believe so
we found many parents in flint still bathe their young children with bottled water
first warmed on the stove then brought to the tub when i'm in clinic almost every day
a mom asks me is my kid going to be okay so that's the number one kind of anxiety and
how do you answer that i i sit down i sometimes hold their hand and i reassure my my patients
and their parents just as i would before the crisis to to keep doing everything that you're
supposed to be doing to promote your children's development the story will continue after this
the flint registry is now live in january of 2019 she launched the flint registry the first
comprehensive look at the thousands of kids exposed to lead in flint the goal of the federal
and state funded program is to track the health of those kids and get them the help they need
so today is the final day of his assessment the registry refers hundreds of kids to specialists
who conduct eight hours of neuropsychological assessments of their behavior and development
dr mona shared her preliminary findings with 60 minutes before the crisis about 15 percent
of the kids in flint required special education services but of the 174 children who went through
the extensive neuro exams specialists determined that 80 percent will require help for a language
learning or intellectual disorder what are you gonna do there's not much we can do so there's
no magic pill there's no antidote there's no cure we can't take away this exposure but
incredible science has taught us that there's a lot that we can do to promote the health and
development of children and that's exactly what we're doing through the registry already 2 000
flynn children who are exposed to lead have been connected to services such as speech
and occupational therapy which some may need for the rest of their lives but we also realized that
our research our science this data and facts was also an underestimation of the exposure
why underestimated because we were looking at blood data done as part of these surveillance
programs which are done at the ages of of one and two lead and water impacts a younger age group
it impacts the unborn to determine that impact dr mona turned to a novel technique developed by dr
manish aurora at new york's mount sinai hospital he examines baby teeth baby teeth begin to grow
in utero just like growth rings in trees every day a tooth forms a ring and anything that we're
exposed to in our diet what we eat what we breathe what we drink gets trapped in those growth rings a
laser cuts through the tooth to analyze whether lead is embedded in the growth rings of teeth
dr mona has sent teeth from 49 flynn kids to be analyzed this was a scan on the tooth of a child
who was six months old when the water source switched in flint as we hit that six-month mark
where the water's water supply was changed you can see how you can see how the lead levels go up
and then they just keep keep going up as more and more leads entering the body it shoots straight up
wow for the first time researchers can pinpoint to the day even before birth when a child was
exposed to lead from the water and at what levels those early years are a critical time for brain
development you're taking giant steps as we were following dr mona's work in flint another american
city was forced to hand out cases of water testing on the drinking water in newark new jersey
found lead levels four times higher than the federal limit in some places higher than flint
newark officials were warned about its water more than two years ago newark new jersey is like
living flint all over again if we cannot guarantee that all kids get access to safe drinking water
not just privileged kids but all kids have access to safe drinking water um that's just one issue
like who are we this is not isolated this is an everywhere story this is an america story
last month we made another visit to flint to check in with sandra jones
okay let's move on out y'all moving too slow let's move him out you all need to keep up
with him that's it that's the way you do that she was still in command despite temperatures
in the single digits come on hop out hundreds in flint are still coming to her church parking
lot for their weekly supply of water more than five years after the crisis began