(ThyBlackMan.com) Is Watts the new Flint, Michigan? This is not an academic, or hyperbole question. It’s potentially a deadly serious issue to thousands of Watts residents and especially those in the sprawling Nickerson Gardens Housing project.
Put simply, test after test by L.A. city officials have shown that the lethal lead content in the resident’s water potentially reaches serious health hazard levels. The worst part is that city health officials still say they need to conduct yet another round of testing. So, it’s no exaggeration to utter the name Flint and the situation that plagued that city’s residents with their chemically contaminated water in the same breath as Watts.
A decade ago, millions of Americans were shocked at the appalling water contamination that the mostly poor Black residents of Flint, Michigan faced. They suffered the prospect of deadly risk of disease and death from unsafe drinking water.
The double shock was that city, state and even federal officials knew about the deadly drinking water crisis but dithered, delayed, made excuses, and pointed fingers. Meanwhile the residents got sicker and sicker from the tainted water.
The grim reality that is confirmed in countless studies by local health departments and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is that there is a gaping disparity in safe water in homes and neighborhoods. The reason is race. The EPA has repeatedly found that poor, impoverished Black and Hispanics are far more likely to drink chemically contaminated water than middle class, upscale whites. One particularly damning report by an environmental research group is entitled Watered Down Justice. The group examined EPA data on safe water in communities for a three-year period from 2016 to 2019. It found that many local agencies for years blatantly violated the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act. This mandates safe drinking water in communities of color.
Worse, when the violations were pointed out local officials often dragged their feet for months even years before fully implementing safe water standards in these communities. The report noted that unsafe drinking water and a lack of standard enforcement affected more than 0ne hundred and thirty million Americans. Again, the disproportionate number of those were Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans both in the cities and in rural areas.
The foot dragging by officials has lethal consequences. Chemically tainted water is consistently linked directly to the increased risk of cancer, compromised fertility, developmental effects, serious infections, and many more health maladies. The damaging effect of unsafe water poses the greatest peril to children, the physically and health challenged, and older persons.
“There is no question that Black and brown communities disproportionately suffer from a lack of access to clean safe water, more so than white communities,” EPA Assistant Administrator Radhika Fox, who runs the agency’s water office, noted, “There are a lot of factors that have led to this, but underinvestment is a huge problem.”
The Biden administration took due note of the danger. In 2022, it allocated more than fifty billion dollars for water infrastructure improvement. The problem though was getting the money for safe water improvement to the neighborhoods that were most affected, namely Black, and Hispanic neighborhoods.
The money had to go through a cumbersome and time-consuming process before release. The states had to apply on behalf of the targeted cities. Approval of the funding would take even more time. In the meantime, the water faucets in the homes of residents in impoverished communities continued to spew chemically contaminated water and the health hazards that this posed continued to mount.
The lead danger in the water in the taps of Watts residents directly parallels that of Flint and Jackson, Mississippi. Officials, after acknowledging the potential crisis, took months to act. They issued flowery statements expressing concern, promised that funds would be allocated for water system upgrade and installing filtration systems, and as in Watts assured that there would be more tests run to determine how unsafe the lead levels in the water were,
Again, while all this posturing and maneuvering for public effect happened as expected the residents continued to be exposed to the perilous water.
There was yet another cautionary note in the potential similarity between the unsafe water crisis in Flint and Watts. Many residents bemoaned their initial lack of action in demanding that local and state officials take real proactive action to fix the problem. As one Flint resident noted, “Clean water is a basic human right, and we shouldn’t have to argue about it. The earth couldn’t survive without water, how much more so can a human being survive without water?”
That’s a question that was repeatedly asked in Flint, Jackson, and dozens of other poor communities that must drink unsafe water. It’s a question that now must be asked by Watts residents who face the same potential danger. Los Angeles city officials have a duty and obligation to give them the same answer they would give residents on L. A’s Westside and other upscale areas in L.A. that never have to worry about disease or a life-threatening hazard from tainted water.
Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson Report.
Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins
