Flint Water Crisis: Interview with Melissa Mays
January 13, 2016
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37:14Now PlayingFlint Water Crisis: Interview with Melissa Mays
YouTube Description
as posted by the channelMelissa Mays is a Flint mother of three boys who helped start "Water You Fighting For?", a grass roots group that campaigned to end the city's use of the Flint River.
Since January 2015, the small group of us have been protesting, marching, rallying and holding educational meetings to inform citizens and incite change within our city.
April 25, 2014 marks the date where the citizens of Flint have been consuming and paying 8 times the national average for water contaminated with TTHMs (carcinogenic byproducts), ecoli, lead, copper and many other heavy metals.
THE WATER IS NOT SAFE!! Please spread the word and tell everyone you know. It's time we stand up and do what's right as a city to fight against the corruption that runs as dirty as our water through this city.
Water You Fighting For?
We were paying to poison our kids': lead in Michigan city's water hits children
Residents also pay some of the highest water rates in the US, in the community known for its economic decline.
After months of resisting complaints about the water, and even a press conference by local doctors warning of potential effects, officials relented this week, declaring a public health emergency.
The spike in lead occurred last spring after Flint changed the source of its drinking water. Conducted by a pediatrician with Hurley Medical Center, the newest study examined the lead levels of hundreds of children, comparing blood tests taken before and after April 2014, when Flint stopped using Detroit water and started drawing water from the Flint River as a temporary cost-saving measure.
According to Virginia Tech researchers, water from the Flint River is far more corrosive than Detroit’s supply, and it eats away at lead from service lines, before flowing into homes across the city of 100,000.
For weeks, city and state officials hadn’t embraced the findings with open arms and insisted the city’s water was safe to drink.
But following the release of the Hurley study last week, the city promptly issued a lead advisory, telling residents to flush their pipes and install water filters. In addition, the city said, it is now feverishly working to implement a corrosion control plan to reduce levels of lead.
“The lead poisoning was a game changer,” Lee-Anne Walters said.
Almost immediately after Flint switched to the river, Walters said her household’s water was “coming in brown”. Whenever her four-year-old son Gavin would come in contact with the water, she said, “he would break out in this scaly, gross rash”.
Months later, in August, Edwards was on the ground with a group of seven research scientists and nine graduate students, alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a “small army” assembled by Mays and Walters’ citizen group Water You Fighting For?
Read More
When did state know about lead in Flint water? 6 takeaways from Snyder plan
Interview with Melissa Oct. 30, 2015 Facebook event page:
Flint Water Crisis Timeline (1963-2016)
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