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2017

The Flint Water Crisis and the Role of Professional Emergency The Flint Water Crisis and the Role of Professional Emergency

Managers in Risk Mitigation Managers in Risk Mitigation

Mark Paine

Jacksonville State University

Jane A. Kushma

https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsem-2017-0009

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     ProofCheck     

A federal emergency was declared in Flint, Michigan on January 16, 2016 because of elevated lead levels in

the city drinking water system. Resulting from a number of technical mistakes and a lack of oversight by the

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, this crisis may have implications for the professional practice

of emergency management. This paper explores the relationship between critical infrastructure and disaster

theory, reviews the Flint crisis as a representative case study, and presents recommendations for emergency

managers to begin to assess the drinking water systems within their own communities. As this is a still-evolving

event, the discussion is based on the extent of the information available to both researchers and the public

primarily as of late Fall, 2016. Future researchers will need to evaluate records from upcoming court proceedings

emergency manager to denote certain political appointees that govern municipalities and report directly to the

governor. However, this paper uses the term in its broader sense to refer to professionals that seek to reduce

disaster-related risk within their communities. Likewise, this paper uses the term emergency management to

denote the profession associated with community risk reduction.

The scope of emergency management appears to be constantly evolving. The January 16, 2016 Flint, Michi-

gan drinking water crisis has established that a lack of safe drinking water may trigger both state and federal

emergency declarations. Emergency managers across the country may now be expected to participate more

heavily in the provision of a safe and reliable drinking water supply for their communities. The techniques

available to emergency managers to reduce risk associated with their drinking water supplies are still emerg-

ing. This paper explores how critical infrastructure ts within disaster theory, reviews the Flint crisis as a case

entities may own or operate a PWS. All other drinking water systems are considered a non-PWS. (A typical non-

PWS would be a well that serves one small building.) Each PWS is further divided into one of three categories:

community water system (CWS), non-transient non-community water system (NTNCWS), or transient non-

community water system (TNCWS). Finally, each PWS may be considered either regulated or non-regulated,

primarily depending on whether they treat water (40 CFR 141.3, 2016). CWSs are demarcated from non-CWSs

because they serve residents, versus people. A NTNCWS diers from a TNCWS because the former serves the

same people for at least six months per year. The classication of drinking water systems is summarized in

Figure 1.

Mark Paine    

     

     ProofCheck     

nicipal supplier. In turn, the municipal supplier may be attached to the PWS of a larger water district. Therefore,

an individual on this hypothetical military installation may draw drinking water that passed through three

dierent systems: the installation’s exempted distribution-only system, the municipal system, and the water

district. Flint, between 1967 and 2014, procured water that originated from a PWS in Detroit then received it

into their own PWS. The crisis in Flint was initiated when the city stopped purchasing water from Detroit and

began producing and treating their own water from the Flint River without proper procedures or oversight in

place. This decision resulted in elevated levels of lead in the drinking water. Flint reverted back to purchasing

water from Detroit after this discovery, although the existing damage to the distribution system continues to

result in elevated lead levels for the residents.

The crisis in Flint raises questions for communities across the country. What controls are in place to prevent

Critical infrastructure, as dened by the Department of Homeland Security, provides vital services to commu-

nities [Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (2003); 42 U.S.C. 5195c(e)]. Examples of vital services include

drinking water, electric power, or natural gas. In the scholarly literature, critical infrastructure may be catego-

rized as large technical systems (LTSs) (Joerges 1988). A signicant failure of a LTS associated with infrastruc-

ture could possibly lead to either a public health or ecological disaster, or both. Scholars within the eld of

emergency management seek to better understand societal risk resulting from the failure of an LTS in order to

reduce the potential for harm. Numerous factors, such as industrial accidents, natural disasters, or terrorism,

may contribute to the failure of an LTS.

Traditional disaster theory may categorize a hazard posed by an LTS as either a technological hazard (McEn-

tire 2004) or an industrial hazard (Perrow 2007). The former designation suggests that technology itself, rather

Emergency managers have experience assessing vulnerability associated with terrorism and natural disas-

ters. However, assessing the risk presented by industrial systems, such as a public utility, presents an emerging

challenge. Emergency managers may gain insights from a group of professionals termed “reliability profes-

sionals” (Schulman et al. 2004, p. 24). Reliability professionals are technicians and middle managers who are

     ProofCheck     

responsible for safely running LTSs associated with critical infrastructure. They have legal obligations to protect

both workers and the public. In addition, they are required to maintain appropriate technological skillsets in

order to reduce risk. In short, they have the skills that are required in order to properly assess and prevent risks

posed by LTSs.

Reliability professionals may be design engineers, government regulators, quality assurance experts, or hold

other job classications. The successful application of their craft requires both technical knowledge and a com-

Emergency management as a whole lacks a unied theory (Van der Waldt 2013). In contrast, LTSs have

paradoxical archetypes (La Porte 1996). High reliability organizations (HROs) assert that risk can be eliminated

by establishing ideal business processes. Alternately, normal accident theory (NAT) holds that failures are in-

evitable within an LTS when levels of complexity and tight coupling are elevated (Perrow 1999). Therefore,

HRO theory states that an accident will never occur in some organizations while NAT suggests that an accident

will always occur at some point within all organizations. A consensus resolution between these two theories

remains elusive. Future developments within these theories may enable a better understanding of how reliabil-

ity professionals, for example, within the drinking water industry, may work together to prevent catastrophic

results.

The role of reliability professionals inevitably gets reviewed after industrial disasters. Human factors may be

study of the Flint crisis presents an example where most scholars have utilized the system approach to explain

what happened although the Michigan attorney general is bound to the person approach that seeks to assign

personal responsibility.

A Joint Select Committee on the Flint Water Emergency (Joint Select Committee) (2016) report summarizes

the history of how citizens in Flint have received their drinking water. Prior to 1967, the city utilized the Flint

River as its source of drinking water. Between 1967 and 2014, water was purchased from the Detroit Water and

Sewerage Department (DWSD). In 2013, Flint entered the Karegnondi Water Authority and was scheduled to

have its own pipeline from Lake Huron by 2016. After learning of Flint’s new plan, the DWSD then canceled the

supply contract and the two parties were not able to successfully renegotiate. Therefore, Flint was left without

     ProofCheck     

six hours so that the water is known to have had contact time with the structure’s plumbing. Pre-ushing is a

practice whereby the technician, or someone else at the technician’s direction, ushes the system before starting

the six-hour clock prior to collecting a sample for lead.

A review of federal regulations for monitoring lead in tap water did not reveal any prohibitions on pre-

ushing prior to collecting samples (40 CFR 141.86(b)). A federal EPA memorandum recommends against pre-

ushing, although it stopped short of banning it. Specically, the memorandum stated “EPA recommends that

One possible explanation for federal EPA reluctance to ban pre-ushing is that it may be appropriate in

some cases. For example, if a home has been vacant for a period of days or longer, then the sampled water may

have higher lead levels than would be experienced during routine use. Apparently for this purpose, the Mas-

sachusetts Executive Oice of Energy and Environmental Aairs advises technicians to “not collect samples in

the morning after vacations, weekends, or holidays because the water will have remained stagnant for too long

and would not represent the water used for drinking during most days of the week” [Massachusetts Executive

Oice of Energy and Environmental Aairs (MA EEA) (n.d), n.d. n.p.]. (It may be useful for the federal EPA to

clarify when pre-ushing is acceptable, given that they have recommended against it but have not prohibited

the practice.)

Drinking water originates as source water, typically either from groundwater or surface water such as a lake

pipes and the drinking water, or the modication of drinking water chemistry (such as pH and hardness) to

inhibit the potential for corrosion” (p. 1).

The federal EPA stated that during the Flint crisis “the presence of lead in the City [of Flint] water supply

     ProofCheck     

Enforcement authority of the SDWA, known as primacy, is delegated to state governments, rather than being

retained by the federal EPA, with only a few exceptions. The federal EPA only retains primacy in “Wyoming,

the District of Columbia, and throughout all of Indian country, other than the Navajo Nation” [Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) (2009), p. 4]. There is not a standardized nomenclature for state agencies that main-

tain primacy over drinking water. Michigan, for example, maintains primacy through their Department of En-

vironmental Quality (DEQ) while Florida utilizes a Department of Environmental Protection. In the Flint crisis, the

more separate PWSs. In Detroit, the residents drink treated surface water from a single PWS, which they own.

In Flint, the residents currently drink water from the Flint PWS, which purchases all of its water from the DWSD.

Commonly, PWSs are referred to by the name of the owning municipal authority.

Flint, as the owner of a PWS, is legally responsible for providing safe drinking water to its nearly 100,000 res-

idents. The Michigan DEQ, as the primacy agency, must provide oversight over Flint. The Flint PWS, although

owned by the City of Flint, is a distinct entity. Nothing in the SDWA prohibited Flint from directing its PWS

to utilize the Flint River to obtain their drinking water, even if utilizing a new source of water were to increase

risk. However, the switch to the new source was required to maintain compliance with both the SDWA and

Michigan state law. A Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been led to obtain copies of

the required documentation, in reference to engineering and technical plans, to make the switch to the Flint

Ambrose, on December 20, 2016 (Davey and Smith 2016). The oice of the Michigan attorney general also as-

serts that Flint’s external water experts inaccurately declared the system to be operating in compliance with the

law and that a DEQ employee also fradulently certied the Flint water treatment plant. However, no criminal

     ProofCheck     

documenting the extent of the lead contamination and developing long-term solutions for the city. In addition,

the Michigan state legislature has appointed a Joint Select Committee. The Joint Select Committee was primarily

focused on changes to program administration in order to prevent future crises. One area for future study is

the failure of the administrative and technical process associated with switching from one source of drinking

water to another. Currently, the source information required for an analysis of the root cause of the Flint water

crisis remains sealed from both the public and researchers.

documents associated with their operations. Which is correct? Either waterworks need to submit plans to the

DEQ for approval, as written in state law, or the DEQ internally determines when plans need to be submitted.

There are also conicting reports regarding the DEQ position on the Flint PWS corrosion control plan during

the switch to the Flint River. One position of the Michigan DEQ is that they believed that an eective corrosion

control plan was in place (Various 2015; Williams and Smith 2015). A second position of the Michigan DEQ is

that they permitted the Flint PWS to avoid having a corrosion control plan while lead sampling was ongoing

[Joint Select Committee on the Flint Water Emergency (Joint Select Committee) (2016) and Lynch (2015)]. If they

believed an eective plan was in place, then they would either be negligent in their oversight or they would have

been misled by Flint employees. However, if they approved the omission of a corrosion control plan then they

may have violated both federal and state regulations. The FOIA request which was submitted, if it had been

all PWSs to inventory LSLs and generate a timeline for replacement [California Legislative Information (Cali-

fornia) (n.d) n.d.]. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (2016) has also published a white paper

that cites a National Drinking Water Advisory Council recommendation to begin LSL replacement. Although

Professional emergency managers may take advantage of existing resources to better understand the threats

to drinking water within their communities. The SDWIS may be accessed online and is a quick method of

performing a basic search for PWSs within a community [Safe Drinking Water System (SDWIS) (n.d) n.d.].

The SDWIS is susceptible to data errors like any other database, although it may be useful for initial research.

     ProofCheck     

through the federal EPA in extreme cases. For example, in Flint the federal government had to assist in the

declaration of an emergency as a result of water contamination.

water sampling for lead. Either option requires an intervention within the drinking water industry. However,

an intervention cannot be initiated until the issue is rst adjudicated by a judge or regulator to identify precisely

under what circumstances, if any, it is permissible to ush a tap prior to pulling a water sample to analyze for

lead. If reliability professionals do not know whether or when it is permissible to pre-ush taps, how can the

public be condent the industry knows how to perform other technical tasks?

The Joint Select Committee report acknowledged a breakdown in the administrative and technical processes

     ProofCheck     

of procedures, why are the operators at fault? Instead of faulting operators, the Joint Select Committee could

have advocated for additional resources to fund an eective technical support system for water technicians.

Flint hired external technical experts to assist with their transition from purchasing water from the DWSD to

pumping and treating water from the Flint River. The Michigan attorney general oice has initiated a civil suit

against both of the external engineering rms involved. If accurate advice was given and governmental oicials

were negligent, then the current process of issuing criminal charges may be suicient to address the problem.

delivered, and it remains possible that some information could be released.) It is clear there was no corrosion

control although it is not clear which of the stated positions of the Michigan DEQ is correct: did they believe

that corrosion control was not needed or did they believe that an appropriate corrosion control plan was in

eect? Although the Joint Select Committee has stated the Michigan DEQ was aware there was no corrosion

control plan, a Michigan DEQ oicial disputed this claim and future researchers will need to either follow court

proceedings or le a future FOIA request to obtain clarication.