BLACKSBURG — The Flint, Michigan, water crisis is over, as long as you put a qualifier on it, the Virginia Tech engineering professor who brought it into the public eye said Friday.
On the two-year anniversary of when Marc Edwards and graduate student Siddhartha Roy gave a press conference warning of elevated lead levels in Flint homes, Edwards told a group of reporters gathered at the Inn at Virginia Tech and digitally on a conference call that the elevated lead levels in Flint are now within federal guidelines.
“Obviously there’s still a crisis of confidence [in government] that won’t be restored any time soon,” he said. “That will take time.”
Edwards’ Virginia Tech team of environmental engineers said Friday that the water system they’ve been monitoring in Flint since 2015 is now as safe as tap water is in many poorer American cities.
According to the Tech team’s testing, the water system now meets the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s lead and copper rule, the standard for lead levels with which water systems are judged.
Levels of legionella bacteria, the cause of Legionnaires’ disease and other bacterial infections, is also back to pre-crisis levels.
Edwards on Friday encouraged Flint residents to continue using filters and bottled water, which Michigan still provides for people in the city. Falling within the lead and copper rule means that 90 percent of homes don’t have what the EPA deems dangerously elevated lead levels.
Those levels, though, need to be changed, Edwards said. He hopes the EPA can come up with a new standard that’s more stringent about the amount of lead in drinking water.
He also encouraged people — in Flint and beyond — with lead service lines or on private wells to ensure their safety with a cheap lead filter to be used for drinking water.
Edwards and his team are credited with bringing the crisis to light and creating a national debate after conducting independent testing of Flint water after Flint residents first brought their concerns to him in 2015.
The team found elevated lead levels in the water and a Michigan doctor found elevated levels of lead in the blood of Flint children.
The crisis, and its aftermath, has resulted in attention on water infrastructure, a state of emergency, criminal charges against public officials and a return to an older water system.
Edwards, who was initially shunned by federal and state authorities, said that the fifth round of testing conducted this summer and presented Friday was likely his group’s last in Flint.
However, he said, another Flint-like situation is likely just around the corner. His team is monitoring water well conditions and water systems across the country.
Tech research scientist Jeff Parks, the member of the team who ran most of the lead-level tests in Flint, said he’s now running large-scale lead level tests on water samples from three or four other American cities.
After the Flint crisis brought Edwards’ team national fame, people who were at risk of being in lead contaminated homes began sending in water samples that the lab diligently tests on a 10-year-old machine used to test element levels in water that Parks affectionately calls “The Beast.”
“He [Edwards] doesn’t really turn anyone down,” Parks said.
Reflecting on the Flint water crisis, Edwards said it’s shown the importance of water quality monitoring in American cities to the general public like never before.
“It’s opened people’s eyes to how high the stakes are,” he said.
Edwards said the response of regulatory agencies at the federal level and Michigan to get the problems in Flint corrected has been encouraging, and he renewed his trust ever so slightly in the government.
As for the future, the Tech team won’t totally ignore the city. They’ll likely stay on top of current events and continue conversations with Flint residents.
But there are other places in the north — Edwards named Milwaukee and Pittsburgh specifically — for the group to monitor. The work won’t stop, Edwards said.
“We’ll keep doing this as long as we can,” he said.
