Helping Since 2014 First Baptist Missionary Church has distributed more than 5 million bottles of water to residents of their city whose lead-contaminated water supply became a crisis and made headlines all over the world. Then they had help from Jaden Smith’s Water Box and the EPA.
Is Flint water safe to drink now?
- Not yet. The city of Flint uses
Water Boxes- mobile H2O filters that clean drinking H2O at 8-10 gallons per/min for residents and are working on Infrastructure - EPA’s awarded the city $100 million to oversee Flint’s water source & compliance & will monitor & replace lead & galvanized service lines that still cause pollution in their water.
The Water Box filters out harmful lead and other bacteria with other contaminants and can produce up to 10 gallons of clean drinking water per minute. Flint residents will be able to collect the water in their own containers during scheduled distribution times with the help of the Church and its residents. Until the city’s Infrastructure is replaced.
Jaden Smith Water Box
The water Box is a Mobile water treatment system built on wheels that were developed by The Last Kilometer, a non-profit dedicated to solving resource problems beyond the grid by accelerating the adoption of clean water technologies.
The treatment device can distribute 8-10 gallons per/minute which is a considerable amount for one machine and its result is guaranteed. With the help of Jaden Smith and The First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church to help ensure residents’ access to safe drinking water, the future looks bright for the city that gets little or no respect according to many that have been living there for many years.
The people here are humble yet proud of the city’s hardworking blue-collar traditions of nicely kept neighborhoods that were the base of employees that built automobiles for the world.
The water that the group from the church hands out will be tested for bacteria and other aspects by a third-party laboratory every one to two weeks.
Flint residents can view the results of these tests on the website or in newspapers. The story of Flint can be a model for other small cities and towns around the country. The reason why politicians are the world’s favorite type of person.
A few years back when the city decided to switch drinking water sources without properly going through the appropriate conditions of planning the worst being. Not treating the system to reduce corrosion.
This corrosion ate through the existing water lines and release huge amounts of lead from the distribution lines that traveled from the treatment plant and ended up in people’s supply lines coming into their homes.
The First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church and other determined residents have been on the front lines helping to get their city, back on its feet since then.
Exposure to lead-contaminated water can cause irreversible, long-term health problems. The crisis has disproportionately affected black communities: Flint is almost 57 percent black and elderly and has been here since “the good days” when all were making good money and had positive ways of life until the factories closed down.
Residents in this town don’t see giving up as an option. You can see it on their faces and hear it in their voices. But they did need a helping hand and they got it. It was the Water Box.
The Water Box uses three-stage filtration and UV treatment to clean the city water. The 5-micron, carbon block, and 1-micron filters remove bad taste, odor, chlorine, lead, and 80+ other contaminants. After passing through the filters the water is treated with a UV lamp that kills waterborne microorganisms such as viruses and bacteria.
The results are guaranteed and sampled by the church to be tested by a third-party laboratory that they choose. The government is left out of the cycle because of the non-trust issues.
The water is tested every time the Box is used by the Operators for a variety of drinking water parameters like PH, and TDS and the main problem Flint had to deal with that was lead.
Additionally, it is tested for microbiological content, that’s found in unsanitary source water like coliforms and bacteria all tests are done by Michigan accredited third-party laboratories to ensure the water is clean and safe and the results aren’t biased or manipulated. The Deacons from the Trinity Baptist Church are instrumental in the sampling and testing.
- Daily test for lead is conducted and reported on a weekly basis.
- Daily Test for Microbiological contaminants is reported on a weekly basis.
- Quarterly Third-Party testing for lead and other heavy metals is conducted.
- Quarterly Third-Party testing for microbiological contaminants is conducted.
The Deacons from First Trinity operate the Water Box and ensure that it’s running efficiently. The key factor in developing the Water Box was to make it easy to understand and operated by the church members.
The church members have said that the new water filtration system is helping them further the church’s mission to the community. If everyone knows about how and why it works, then it takes the mystery out of it. You take the mystery out that takes the distrust out of it.
Flint Water Crisis Government Response
According to the Governor’s office, the amount of lead found in Flint’s water is now less than half the current federal action level, according to independent tests.
There could be even further plans developed by Smith and his company that will bring treatment systems into the homes of Flint’s city residents if they can work out the trust issues that were lost between the city and the residents that have corroded just like the pipes that supply the drinking water.
Actress Jada Pinkett Smith attended a church meeting at Trinity Baptist and declared that she would personally donate another Water Box to the city of Flint one of Michigan’s poorest cities. The state has stopped delivering free bottled water to the resident as of last year claiming the information from the Governor’s office was correct, that the level for lead and other contaminants were well within parameters and the water was drinkable. The residents don’t agree.
Smith’s Green non-profit Company called Just Water has been working with the Church and the community donating bottled water to Flint and through their working relationship came up with the idea of the Water Box. No longer would they have to rely on outside sources for clean drinking water.
Flint Water Crisis Summary
Due to insufficient water treatment, lead leached from the old water pipes into the drinking water, lead, and other serious contaminants exposed 100,000 residents of the city to the water system.
There are some City Officials who believe that as early as 2017 the water supply from Flint was cleared and returned to acceptable levels but because of trust issues the people wouldn’t believe the officials.
Between 2014 and 2015 in the predominately black city of Flint, 12 people died, and at least 87 were sickened by the drinking water. The deaths were attributed to the Bacterial contaminants that occurred during the Lead problem that was leached into the water supply.
There was no attempt early on to communicate or alert a message to the ratepayers who continued to drink and be billed for the water with lead in it.
For the last 2 consecutive years, Flint’s water has met EPA guidelines for lead but it doesn’t matter because once the water leaves the treatment facility where it is processed it is sent into an old ancient distribution system that is eroded and poisoned by the lead and contaminates that poisoned it the first time.
How the pipes and infrastructure got this way is superseded by the lack of interest in alerting customers of the Water Company that there was a huge problem in the water. The possible abuse of funds that should have gone to fix a broken infrastructure, not only plagues this city but many cities throughout the country. So Flint like a lot of American cities is putting the cart before the horse.
The aging infrastructure might not ever be fixed. The resident’s responsibility ends at the curb where the water is delivered by the city. The remaining system is miles upon miles of distribution and transmission lines throughout the city’s grid system that probably is 100 years old.
Flint Infrastructure
EPA is now concerned that Flint who is attempting to replace distribution lines now has a new problem The service line replacement program aimed at removing those lines is continuing later this year, but that work will create another potential threat — the release of particulate lead due to the extensive underground construction. Living with lead could be a forever kind of thing.
The infrastructure will take time to fix but there are good solid ways to approach the Lead problems that Flint is having until the pipes are replaced. One is a Faucet Filter that simply screws on your faucet and will remove most if not all lead from incoming water.
Flint Water Lawsuit Settlement
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today awarded a $100 million grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to fund drinking water infrastructure upgrades in Flint, Mich. The funding, provided by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016, or WIIN, enables Flint to accelerate and expand its work to replace lead service lines and make other critical infrastructure improvements. According to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. “EPA will especially focus on helping Michigan improve Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure.”
“The people of Flint and all Americans deserve a more responsive federal government,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.“EPA will especially focus on helping Michigan improve Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure.” Under President Trump’s budget blueprint SRF remains fully funded, and the proposal provides robust funding for the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program to finance critical drinking and wastewater infrastructure.
The Water Box in Flint
With all the mistakes that were made in Flint through lack of communications, politics, or misappropriations of funds, Flint’s problems might have been just plain old incompetence that sadly resulted in people’s illness and death.
The federal government sees this as an experience that will never be forgotten. Over the years the Federal Government has provided more than 32 billion dollars to help rebuild infrastructure in aging cities here in America.
The city also lost the most important quality that people in government can ask from the people of the city, Trust from the people that have lived here all their life. The people who loved this place The people that lost their children.
On August 20 2020 The state of Michigan and other defendants reached a $600 million settlement in the Flint Michigan lawsuit that will provide hundreds of millions in payments to city residents.
The scary thing is that the other Flint, Michigan’s are just waiting in the wings. Our city’s infrastructure is broken down with its warning signs long past and nothing done.
With Infrastructure repair in and around the City along with a Filtration Device and the supply that comes from the Water Box, it’s getting there with the help of State and Federal Authorities.
The answer might be to move the solution into the home and right to the kitchen sink. How can you trust city officials that are moving on to bigger and better things to make decisions that a member of the community can make with the purest intentions and nothing to gain from it.
You can tell (from the video) how these people talk about Flint, how they love Flint but despise and don’t trust the city officials who took them on a ride for the purpose of covering their own behinds.
The Rapper, Jaden Smith, and the Church Members of Flint along with the Old-time residents who preside over this great community don’t give up. When everyone else did from General Motors to the over half the population who left when times got too hard, should look to the folks there now. They are running on fumes of hope for the future. Nothing less.
There is hope. Because of folks like the 20-year-old Jaden Smiths of the world and the Flint Baptist Church members along with the new Water Technology that holds the key to temporary solutions for problems, we will face the upcoming water crises in all cities with the same types of problem, an aging Infrastructure.
JimGalloway Author/Editor
