Environmental engineer Siddhartha Roy is baffled when the state of Michigan insists the water in Flint is safe to drink despite his scientific evidence.

Siddhartha Roy is an Environmental Engineer and PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. He works with Dr. Marc Edwards researching corrosion failures in potable water infrastructure. Sid also serves as the student leader and communications director for the Virginia Tech “Flint Water Study” research team that helped uncover the Flint Water Crisis.

This episode originally aired on April 21, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I was really, really angry. Livid, in fact. How could the State of Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, MDEQ, insist that the water inflow in Michigan was safe to drink? What kind of data did they have? Because our scientific evidence showed there was a clear problem.

Come to think of it, where was the EPA? It had been a year since Flint switched its water source to the Flint River and they were not treating the water as per federal law. Consequently, their water had turned orange. It smelled like sewage. There were bacteria problems. People were complaining of skin rashes and other health problems. And then there was lead.

Lead is a neurotoxin with no biological function in the body. It is especially harmful to young fetuses, children under the age of six, causes drop in IQ points, developmental disabilities, a whole host of issues.

So, concerned about these things, a local grassroots organization led by parents, pastors, and activists in Flint started working with our research group to figure this out. So in August 2015 we sent them three hundred water testing kits so that they could go around the city and sample. Amazingly, this group of mostly women, mothers concerned about their children, worked sixteen-hour days driving across town making sure every zip code was covered. And they had a good estimate scientifically on what was going on in the water.

Closer to home in Blacksburg, Virginia, a bunch of twenty-something scientists-in-training were working voluntarily weekends, overnight, just to get those kits running, analyzing the samples, getting the numbers out. And the numbers showed there was a clear problem.

So the next step for all of us was to call the residents with high lead. No one trains you to do stuff like this. So I wrote this script where I was like, “Hi, my name is Sid. I’m from Virginia Tech. Here are your results.”

I was also concerned that people on the phone would not understand me because I suffer from what I like to call Acquired American Accent Syndrome. If you haven't noticed, my accent is all over the place. One of my dates actually told me, “You sound like a British Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.”

But as we started calling residents, we did not know what to expect but they started telling us their stories. Some of these phone calls were five, ten minutes, some of them over an hour. They talk about how someone in their house was sick, something was wrong with their family, issues with money.

There was one phone call in particular I will never forget. There was this elderly woman with high lead and I told her, “You cannot drink this water.” And she said, “So what do I do?”

I went, “You can either buy bottled water or get a lead filter.”

And she asks me, “How much is a lead filter?”

I said, “Oh, it’s thirty dollars. You can buy it at Wal-Mart.”

And she goes, “Well, I live on social welfare. There is no way I can afford thirty dollars in the next two months.”

What do you tell her? How do you respond to something like this? Needless to say I was shocked. I kind of managed through that conversation, but I was too overwhelmed to go on. I couldn’t make those phone calls.

Another grad student valiantly stepped up, made the next sixty phone calls, told everyone what was going on. He was also so shocked, he set up an online fundraiser and we raised some money to buy filters.

Amazingly MDEQ, the state’s premiere agency, hinted to reporters that Flint residents were adding lead to their own water to gain attention. First off, I don't know how you do that. But if you manage to find a way, imagine an entire population of a hundred thousand people pulling together this amazing con… the conspiracy of it all to kind of mess with a few scientists at a local state agency. It was beyond ridiculous.

We also started posting the results online because we thought we had an ethical obligation to get this out. And so MDEQ came after us. They said, “This group, meaning this research group, specializes in looking for lead in water problems. They pull that rabbit out of the hat wherever they go.”

No mention of data or sampling protocols or what we did. We were fucking lead magicians. I wish I could show you the purple suit I wear to my laboratory every day. It’s exactly like the one John Cusack was forced to buy from Eugene Levy from the sappiest movie ever, Serendipity. I also have a magic wand that I use to do all my experiments.

So concerned with this all, Marc, my adviser, and I, we flew to Flint to hold a town hall meeting and a press conference to stand next to the Flint residents who were doing all this work and give people the evidence that they needed. We were issuing a public health advisory when the people who are paid to protect the public were not doing it.

Amazingly, the day we were going to hold our press conference, a day before that, the city had called an emergency city council hearing to talk about drinking water and they had invited the public in. Now, no one knows it at the time, but I was at that meeting, filming.

So the mayor and the water guys come in on stage, gave a short presentation, show how everything is fine, and then leave. Then people start coming up and voicing their concerns. They are given two minutes to talk about some stuff and then they're like, “Your time is up. Please go.”

There was this one elderly woman who got up on stage and was continuing to talk, and the city councilmen, there's this guy who goes, “Ma’am, if you keep talking I'll have you arrested.” I’m sitting there thinking, That was an empty threat. No way. I mean, come on.

So she did not stop. She kept on talking. Then this guy repeated. “Ma’am, if you don’t stop, I will have you arrested.” And everyone joins in, the other people. “Josh” -- that was the name of the guy, the city council guy -- “please don’t do this. Please let these people speak.” And then she did not stop. She went ahead and talked anyway.

Well, two officers arrived, arrested her, and took her out of the city council hall.

This happened. It’s on tape. I recorded it.

So as I’m walking out I turned to Melissa Mays, who was one of the citizen leaders, and I asked her what the hell happened. She goes, “Yeah. That’s normal. Are you hungry? Let’s go have dinner.” Wow.

So with this I was clearly very mad. Up until this point I was trying to be dispassionate. The ideal of the scientist – you come in, you present your data, you talk about what’s wrong and then you walk away. I kind of managed to do that the next day at the actual press conference where we had a lot of people come in. I told them what the problem was. They were not crazy in what they were seeing and sensing and the issues that they were facing, that this was real and science was validating that.

So at the end of it all there were hugs and tears, there were people who were really grateful that we had come out and done this for them.

So as I’m walking back to the hotel I step into the lobby and I see myself on television. It was the local ABC News channel that had covered the event. Two things popped into my head. The first was, Is that a receding hairline? Am I freaking losing hair over this? And two, because the state was insisting everything was fine and the federal EPA was still nowhere to be seen, it seemed like nothing was going to happen. I mean, it was good that there was awareness now and more people knew, it was on TV, etcetera, but maybe this is as far as we could go.

Ten days later, a local pediatrician, Dr. Mona, came forward with her results showing how instances of childhood lead poisoning had doubled in the city.

A week after that, Michigan’s governor acknowledged the problem and they found the money to switch back to the original water source.

Two months later, President Obama came in and declared a State of Federal Emergency and the whole world knew what was going on in Flint.

To date, the city has received more than six hundred million dollars to work on their water infrastructure but also bottled water, filters and the health nutrition education of Flint’s children for the coming decades.

But what’s also fascinating is scientists at MDEQ were criminally indicted for how they misused science. They actually committed scientific misconduct in how they sampled and showed there wasn’t a problem when there was clearly a problem. These are civil servants who are paid to protect all of us. For them to commit something like this is beyond shocking. You hear about this in history and think, Yeah, probably people were crazy back then, but it still happens.

So I came away shocked, disillusioned but also realized that the holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was so right when he said, Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

So I hope the next time you see something, especially it’s the scientists, the next time you see something, you do stand up with science by your side like we did in Flint. Thank you.