Flint water crisis
contamination by lead of water supply in Flint, Michigan
The Flint water crisis was a public health crisis from 2014 to 2019 which involved the drinking water for the city of Flint, Michigan, being contaminated with lead and possibly Legionella bacteria.
In April 2014, during a financial crisis, state-appointed emergency manager Darnell Earley changed Flint's water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (sourced from Lake Huron and the Detroit River) to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels. A pair of scientific studies confirmed that lead contamination was present in the water supply. The city switched back to the Detroit water system on October 16, 2015. It later signed a 30-year contract with the new Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) on November 22, 2017.
On January 5, 2016, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in Genesee County, of which Flint is the major population center. Shortly thereafter, President Barack Obama declared a federal state of emergency, authorizing additional help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
Between 6,000 and 12,000 children were exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Flint water crisis” as contamination by lead of water supply in Flint, Michigan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as contamination by lead of water supply in Flint, Michigan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22022495. Authority coordinates are 43.056, -83.671. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2019, 2015 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flint water crisis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.