Corrosive lessons

Like many of the industrial cities in the Rust Belt, Flint has struggled, its population falling from about 200,000 in 1960 to 100,000 today, with about 40 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. These economic pressures point to a unique trait in Michigan governance—emergency managers—that played a role in the water crisis.

When a school district, city, town, or county is in severe financial stress, the state can appoint an emergency manager with power to overrule local elected officials, said Curt Guyette, a reporter for the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union, who has written extensively about the situation in Flint. During the Flint crisis, the emergency manager position changed hands, introducing even more volatility to an already difficult dynamic.

In March 2013, the Flint City Council opted to stop buying water from Detroit and to join a regional water authority that would draw water from Lake Huron and send it to Flint by pipeline. While the pipeline was under construction, a process that continues today, the emergency manager decided that Flint should use the Flint River as its water source. As soon as the switch was made in April 2014, residents began complaining about the smell, taste, and color of their new water. Protesters soon packed city hall with bottles of discolored, cloudy water.

In a June 2015 memo, Miguel Del Toral, the regulations manager in the EPA's groundwater and drinking water branch, who referred Walters to Edwards, released a memo based on Edwards' testing of Walters' 30 samples, outlining the astronomical levels of lead, the timeline of events, and the laws (i.e., corrosion control) the city wasn't following. An EPA official above Del Toral tried to bury the memo, and state officials downplayed the results.

Edwards, unfortunately, recognized what could be happening. More than a decade ago, the Washington, D.C., water utility had invalidated samples that pointed to rising lead levels and had issued a report claiming the water met federal standards, while the Centers for Disease Control claimed the water was safe and that no D.C. residents had been harmed. Edwards, dubbed "The Plumbing Professor" by Time magazine in 2004, spent years fighting the agencies—with his own money and reputation on the line—in order to protect D.C. residents.

In other cities, too—Durham and Greenville, North Carolina; New Orleans; and more—Edwards has uncovered lead in the water and fought for the public. "It's the same movie," Edwards said. "It's the same ending. It's the fifth time I've seen it, so it's a little sad."

Learning from experience

The lessons of D.C. formed the core of a graduate-level course, Engineering Ethics and the Public, taught each fall in Blacksburg by Edwards and Yanna Lambrinidou, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies in Tech's National Capital Region, who collaborated with Edwards on the D.C. crisis.

Taught since 2010, the course has had a powerful influence on the Flint team's students, and Flint has influenced the course: The crisis served as a case study in the fall 2015 semester. Of primary importance in the curriculum is the first, fundamental canon in the National Society of Professional Engineers' code of ethics: to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public. In recent years, however, and perhaps with increasing frequency, Edwards said, scientists and engineers avoid engagement by claiming that they only play an objective, numbers-based role.

"There's a role that scientists and engineers need to play and that society expects them to play, which is to act and react when they see wrongdoing," Lambrinidou said. "Through inaction, you're enabling the biggest or most powerful and oftentimes the most dangerous and harmful fish in the pool to win. You're taking an active part in reinforcing existing infrastructures and existing imbalances and injustice by staying silent."

Lambrinidou said that in both Washington, D.C., and Flint, residents and citizen-activists were the first to sound alarms about problems with the water. "It was ordinary people, non-experts, parents who discovered their children had elevated blood lead levels and called begging to have their service lines replaced," Lambrinidou said. "We end up as a society and culture [creating] these narratives where we almost invariably place expert knowledge above the knowledge of ordinary people. Ignoring those [ordinary] voices is very, very risky."

By listening to and collaborating with local experts and mobilizing to address the complex problem on-site, the Tech research team perfectly embodies the powerful model for problem-solving that few institutions, apart from the contemporary land-grant university, have offered. In fact, water as an area of excellence is an emerging priority for Virginia Tech.

In a May 2015 speech on academic freedom that Edwards delivered just before analyzing Walters' water samples, the professor quoted Abraham Lincoln, who established the land-grant university system by signing the Morrill Act: The "system is being built on behalf of the people, who have invested in these public universities their hopes, their support, and their confidence." Added Edwards, "The 21st century will surely provide us with many opportunities to prove ourselves worthy of the people, their hope, and confidence… but only if we can find the courage and strength to act on our convictions."