The lead contamination crisis in Flint has resulted in a tidal wave of bottled water being shipped to the state from around the country to provide emergency drinking water for residents. Flimmaker and Flint’s most famous resident, Michael Moore, recently urged the rest of the world to do one thing; stop sending bottled water to Flint.
In the letter written to potential pledgers and donators, Moore pleaded, Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I’m not counting toilet flushes, watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is enough for just one bottle per person– in other words, just enough to cover brushing one’s teeth for one day. You would have to send 200 bottles a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in Flint) needs each day. That’s 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water – which equals 20.4 million16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we’ll need to find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further). Anybody want to pony up for that? Because THAT is the reality.
Moore alleges that the bottled water alternative is merely a band-aid solution to a bigger problem of children that will grow up with irreversible brain damage.
Moore outlines a plan that includes an arrest of Governor Rick Snyder and put the federal government in charge, echoing support for the NRDC lawsuit filed today which requested that a federal court force Flint to get rid of all lead service lines. As far as drinking water for residents, Moore has a pretty solid idea there, too:
For those who choose to stay in Flint, FEMA must create a temporary water system in each home. One idea that has been suggested is to deliver two 55-gallon drums to every home in Flint. Each day water trucks will arrive to fill them with fresh clean glacial water from Lake Huron. The drums will have taps attached to them. People can’t be expected to carry jugs of water from buildings that are miles away.
