Research Confirms Cause Of Flint Crisis

By Sara Jerome,
@sarmje

A failure to include orthophosphate in water treatment processes in Flint was a primary reason for the lead crisis that gripped the city and served up unsafe tap water to locals, according to new research.

A new study published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters makes this argument, bolstering support for a conclusion many researchers and policy officials had already reached.

“The findings provide evidence that selective dissolution of lead phosphate minerals occurred because of the absence of orthophosphate during the crisis,” the study says.

The study relied on corrosion pipe scale samples that were collected from 10 lead service lines (LSLs) in Flint.

“The team used a high-tech sorter — an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer — that can detect trace amounts of metals to precisely measure the amounts of lead, aluminum, magnesium, iron and other metals in samples scraped from the pipes,” PBS Newshour reported.

“In addition to examining pipe samples under a scanning electron microscope, the researchers pulverized the pipe linings to analyze what they're made of,” according to a release from the University of Michigan.

Terri Olson, an environmental chemist and lead investigator of the study, spoke to PBS NewsHour.

“The lack of orthophosphate in the water was to blame for the dramatic release of lead in the system,” she said. “There have been others who sort of disputed that, [but] I think that can be put to rest.”

A retiring state environmental official had claimed that "a spike in water main breaks during the Polar Vortex winters of 2014 and 2015 was a major overlooked factor in the infamous public health disaster," Michigan Live reported.

Still, those remarks broke with the scientific consensus.

“The omission of phosphate corrosion inhibitor when the city switched to the Flint River as a water source in April 2014 is widely considered to be the critical mistake that caused lead service pipes to leach a neurotoxin into drinking water, thus leading to the crisis,” the report said.

Image credit: "20161004-FNS-LSC-0039," U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2016. Public Domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/