You may remember the pictures from the water crisis six years ago in Flint, Michigan. Hundreds of angry residents holding up bottles of rust-colored water and demanding answers. Months of protests were waved off by officials who denied anything was wrong. The turning point came when a local pediatrician found conclusive proof that the children of Flint were being exposed to high levels of lead in their water and prompted the state to declare an emergency.
Now, that same doctor is working to solve a mystery that still worries parents in Flint. What lasting damage did the water do to their kids? As we first reported in March, her initial findings were worse than she feared. But we begin with the legacy of Flint's water crisis. The story will continue in a moment.
Once a week, Hundreds of cars line up for bottled water at the Greater Holy Temple Church of God in Flint. You know you're too old to be driving. Come on.
Where's your sticker, baby? Sandra Jones is in command. She is a pastor's wife. God bless. With the voice of a four-star general.
Let them go. Don't talk. I'm talking, come around me.
He's 90. Take his number. We're going to find a way to deliver to him. Jones keeps the cars moving.
I almost got my toes. And the water coming. Each family is allowed four cases of water.
On this day, they gave away 36,000 bottles. It just strikes me. It's been five years and you're still doing this. Five years.
And the thing about it is, it's not lightening up. I could see it. see it if it was lightening up, but it isn't.
It is not. The state stopped giving away bottled water two years ago because it said the water is safe. Sandra Jones relies on donations of water.
What's it been like? It's been kind of hard. Larry Marshall was second in line.
The widowed father of four got here at 5 a.m. He's been waiting five hours for water. Water should be a basis.
necessity that we shouldn't have to wait or stand in line for. You know, this is not a third-world country, but we're living like one. Marshall, like many in Flint, still refuses to drink tap water.
And if they come to you, the city or the state, and they say you're drinking water safe, are you gonna believe them? No. They lie so much, and we know they lie. When they say something, it's like talking to the wind. You know?
I don't believe nothing they say. None of them politicians, none of them. Flint, once a prosperous hub of the American auto industry, was nearly bankrupt back in 2014. Officials hoped to save money by switching the city water source from the Great Lakes to the Flint River.
Clean water for Flint! Almost immediately, residents began noticing something wasn't right. The water was rust-colored and many people had rashes. What do we want? We want...
But Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality and the city insisted the water in Flint is safe. Later, a state investigation found those officials hid the fact that the river water was not treated with chemicals that would prevent the... pipes from corroding. So for months, the water ate away at Flint's old pipes, releasing lead into residents'tap water. They were poisoned.
I mean, they were poisoned by this water. They were all exposed to toxic water. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician in Flint who her patients call Dr. Mona. See how strong Flint kids are? But Dr. Mona is a bit of a superhero herself here.
Because she was the first to link the water to high levels of lead in the children of Flint. So within a few months of being on this water, General Motors, which was born in Flint and still has plants in Flint, noticed that this water, our drinking water, was corroding their engine part. Just pause. Like, the drinking water was corroding engine parts.
So they were allowed to go back to Great Lakes water. Didn't anybody at that point say, if it's corroding an engine, maybe this shouldn't be going into our bodies, into our kids? I mean, that should have been like fire alarm bells, like red flags.
So what did it take before your eyes opened about this? Yeah, it was the word lead. Because the word lead, when you're a physician or a pediatrician, signals what in your brain?
There is no safe level of lead. We're never supposed to expose A population or a child to lead because we can't do much about it. It is an irreversible neurotoxin. It attacks the core of what it means to be you.
It impacts cognition, how children think, actually drops IQ levels. It impacts behavior leading to things like developmental delays and it has these life-altering consequences. In 2015, Dr. Mona and a colleague started digging through blood test records of 1,700 Flint children, including the kids she sees at the Hurley Children's Clinic.
Ready? Okay. The non-profit clinic serves most of Flint's kids.
The city is 53% black and has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. So we looked at the children's blood lead levels before the water switch, and we compared them to children's blood lead levels. after the water switch. And in the areas where the water lead levels were the highest, in those parts of the city, we saw the greatest increase in children's lead levels.
Armed with the first medical evidence that kids were being exposed to lead from the water, Dr. Mona did something controversial. She quickly held a press conference to share the blood test study before other doctors reviewed her work. So it was a bit of an academic no-no, kind of a form of academic disobedience. But I knew that I knew that.
But like but there was no choice. There was no way I was going to wait to have this this research vetted. Two weeks later, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder ordered the water switched back to the Great Lakes and declared a state of emergency. I say tonight, as I have before, I am sorry and I will fix it.
But the damage was done. Dr. Mona estimates 14,000 kids in Flint under the age of six may have been exposed to lead in their water. I never should have had to do the research that literally used the blood of our children as detectors of environmental contamination.
Three years after the crisis began, the percentage of third graders in Flint who passed Michigan's standardized literacy test dropped from 41 percent to 10 percent. I'm very concerned about my children. And not only my children, but I'm concerned about the children of Flint. Kenyatta Dotson is still fearful of the water, even though the state is spending more than $300 million to fix the water system. The city promised to replace all 12,000 supply lines that may have been contaminated with lead by last fall.
Now they say the work won't be done until summer. Dotson says she and her daughters will continue to use bottled water for cooking and brushing their teeth. I need time to come back to a place where I feel whole again. You don't feel whole right now?
Oh, no. Would this have happened in a rich white suburb? Maybe it would have happened in a rich white suburb. Would it have continued for as long as it has?
I don't believe so. We found many parents in Flint still bathe their young children with bottled water, first warmed on the stove, then brought to the tub. When I'm in clinic, almost every day a mom asks me, is my kid going to be okay?
So that's the number one kind of anxiety. How do you answer that? I sit down. I sometimes hold. their hand and I reassure my patients and their parents just as I would before the crisis to to keep doing everything that you're supposed to be doing to promote your children's development.
The Flint registry is now live. In January of 2019 she launched the Flint registry, the first comprehensive look at the thousands of kids exposed to lead in Flint. The goal of the federal and state funded program is to track the health of those kids. and get them the help they need. So today is the final day of his assessment.
The registry refers hundreds of kids to specialists who conduct eight hours of neuropsychological assessments of their behavior and development. Dr. Mona shared her preliminary findings with 60 Minutes. Before the crisis, about 15% of the kids in Flint required special education services. But of the 174 children, who went through the extensive neuro exams, specialists determined that 80% will require help for a language, learning, or intellectual disorder. What are you going to do?
There's not much we can do. So there's no magic pill, there's no antidote, there's no cure. We can't take away this exposure, but incredible science has taught us that there's a lot that we can do to promote the health and development of children and that's exactly what we're doing.
Through the registry already 2,000 Flint children who are exposed to lead have been connected to services such as speech and occupational therapy which some may need for the rest of their lives. But we also realized that our research, our science, this data and facts was also an underestimation of the exposure. Why underestimated? Because we were looking at blood lead data done as part of these surveillance programs, which are done at the ages of one and two.
Lead in water impacts a younger age group. It impacts the unborn. To determine that impact, Dr. Mona turned to a novel technique developed by Dr. Manish Arora at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. He examines baby teeth. Baby teeth begin to grow in utero.
Just like growth rings in trees. Every day a tooth forms a ring and anything that we're exposed to in our diet, what we eat, what we breathe, what we drink, gets trapped in those growth rings. A laser cuts through the tooth to analyze whether lead is embedded in the growth rings of teeth. Dr. Mona has sent teeth from 49 Flint kids to be analyzed. This was a scan on the tooth of a child who was six months old when the water source switched.
in Flint. As we hit that six month mark where the water supply was changed, you can see how the lead levels go up and they just keep going up as more and more lead's entering the body. It shoots straight up. For the first time, researchers can pinpoint to the day, even before birth, when a child was exposed to lead from the water and at what levels.
Those early years are a critical time for brain development. As we were following Dr. Mona's work in Flint, another American city was forced to hand out cases of water. Working on the drinking water in Newark, New Jersey, found lead levels Four times higher than the federal limit. In some places, higher than Flint.
Newark officials were warned about its water more than two years ago. Newark, New Jersey is like living Flint all over again. If we cannot guarantee that all kids have access to safe drinking water, not just privileged kids, but all kids have access to safe drinking water, that's just one issue.
Like, who are we? This is not isolated to Flint. This is an everywhere story.
This is an America story. We made another visit to Flint to check in with Sandra Jones. Okay, let's move on out.
Y'all moving too slow. Let's move him out. Y'all need to keep up with him. That's it.
That's the way you do that. She was still in command despite temperatures in the single digits. Come on, hop out.
Hundreds in Flint are still coming to her church parking lot for their weekly supply of water, more than five years after the crisis began.