7,000 Children...Permanent Brain Damage

"You left a lot of people dead laying in the street and you still got people dead laying in the street,” Flint's Bruce Stiers told Jordan for SC's upcoming 10-year-anniversary water crisis documentary

Looking downward, I wouldn’t let my worst enemy drink from this green gobbledygook.

That’s what ran through my mind as I stared at the Flint River yesterday at the start of my 20th reporting trip to the city still living through a water crisis 10 years later (or to be exact 3,612 days later).

“7,000 children, lead poisoning, permanent brain damage,” Flint resident Bruce Stiers told me about the permanent damage inflicted upon Flint’s kids by the toxic water delivered to them for years. “In America, you left a lot of people dead and laying in the street and you still got people dead in the street.”

On that porch overlooking the Flint River, I interviewed Bruce, a longtime environmental contractor, about the reckless, and his words—genocidal—decision made a decade ago to move a city of 100,000 people to a polluted river with a dilapidated, substandard water plant relied upon to treat the water.

Bruce added: "The river didn't cause the death of the people, the people that were in charge created a mass calamity disaster of unparalleled proportions.” That interview, and others, will be featured in a documentary we’re currently shooting in Flint for the 10-year-anniversary of this ongoing water crisis.

This morning, I shot a special behind-the-scenes video for paying Status Coup members where I described a powerful moment from my interview with Bruce yesterday. In the video, Jordan reads a section from his upcoming book, “We the Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Cover Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans,” about the mad-dash in 2013/early 2014 to get the Flint water plant ready to switch to the Flint River.

Here’s a short part of the book section Jordan read featuring Mike Glasgow, the operator of Flint’s water plant, and the Flint criminal special prosecutor Todd Flood.

“We have to meet this deadline. ‘No’ is not an option or an answer,” Glasgow recounted Croft dictating. But he pushed back. “I don’t feel we’re ready. I’m uncomfortable with this. I think things are happening too fast.”

Ominously, he told Flood that he feared the rush past all stop signs by state and city officials meant more powerful, unseen forces were at play. “I was stumbling on something above my pay grade.”

BECOME A STATUS COUP MEMBER to watch Jordan’s full ON-THE-GROUND members video in which he reads a longer section from the part of his book about.

Now I’m off for a full day of interviews with other residents and activists. We MAY go LIVE a little bit later. I appreciate your support. If you can, please support this ON-THE-GROUND independent reporting by becoming a member and/or leaving a donation.

Jordan