A “political football.”
That’s how Dennis Muchmore, the former chief of staff to Michigan governor Rick Snyder, described the crisis over the water in the city of Flint in a September 2015 email. The water, which was from the Flint River and which was shot through with poisonous amounts of lead from old, leaking pipes, had wreaked terrible havoc on Flint’s residents for nearly 18 months at this point. It had caused people to begin violently vomiting in the night. It was making people’s hair fall out in great clumps. It was stunting children’s growth and causing potentially irreversible brain damage. It was even too dangerous for car parts.