Politics of water: blame game, grandstanding, incompetence — and a turning point?
By Paul Rozycki At the end of last year, after our mayoral election, our switch back to Detroit water, and the progress on the Karegnondi pipeline, it seemed that the Flint Water Crisis has peaked. This month I was expecting to say a few words about the primary elections….Trump, Hillary, Bernie Sanders, Iowa, New Hampshire and all that. This should have also been a week when the good news of Amir Hekmati’s release from an Iranian...
Water crisis not a “death blow,” Ananich tells neighborhood group
By Lori Nelson Savage Flint’s water emergency, its effect on neighborhood housing and a need to upgrade the tennis courts at Woodlawn Park ignited discussion at the January College Cultural Neighborhood Association (CCNA) meeting. “I don’t think this is a death blow for Flint or for our neighborhood, I think it’s important that we talk about that,” said State Senator Jim Ananich, himself a resident of the neighborhood, addressing a...
Fluttered away like a pack of cards: reflections on Alice in Wonderland and adulthood
By Teddy Robertson When I was about eight years old I was very sick with a fever that must have been unusually high. What caused it or what my mother and grandmother surmised it might be, I don’t remember now. But I was in bed in a dark room, restless and confused. The family prescription was that I needed to sleep, sleep being the general cure-all in household pediatric advice, circa 1953. But domestic illness lore also warned that...
As city-wide lead pipe mapping begins, UM-Flint prof explains how to test your water lines
By Nic Custer Two household items – a key and a magnet – and a set of simple observations may help worried Flint residents determine what their water pipes are made of. UM- Flint professor, Martin Kaufman, Department of Earth and Resource Science, told East Village Magazine how residents can find out if their service line is made of lead, galvanized iron or copper. It’s another step in a crucial process in confronting the lead crisis...
Village Life: Can water be made holy again?
By Jan Worth-Nelson In the bleached and bleak light the morning after the Rachel Maddow show, I wake up torpid and head-achey with depression. I know the signs. When I get so down, the molten lava flowing just under that lethargy usually comes down to one hot origin: fury. It’s a fury so intense my body, programmed from childhood toward cordiality, automatically tries to tamp it down, tries to modulate it, like a stopcock, like the...