Well, thank you everybody. It’s really an honor to be here. And the reason I’m here is that a little over two years ago in December of 13, I became part of an experiment. And that experiment was the ACLU of Michigan got a grant from the Ford Foundation to hire an investigative reporter, me. And it was the first time that that had happened, that the ACLU had had an investigative reporter on staff. So it was basically exploring new ground. Non-profit journalism isn’t new. Mother Jones Magazine, ProPublica, others that engage in non-profit journalism and do really, really great work. The difference is that those organizations were established as news organizations. I work for an advocacy group with a very clear agenda. And I think that they probably have some very good debates in journalism circles as to whether or not I am legitimately a journalist, because I do work for an organization with an agenda. But I came out of the alternative press. I worked for alternative newspapers for most of my career. They were openly liberal. We made no bones about who we were. But I always had the mindset that whatever compelled me to begin an investigation, that once it started, the cards fall where the cards fall. Because if you are going to be a journalist, the most important thing is your credibility. Without credibility, you’re not worth anything. And that, you know, whatever came, came. But the most important thing is that you’re accurate and that you’re telling the truth. If you don’t do those things, you’re a hack and you’re not worth anything. So the ACLU have hired me to investigate issues around Michigan’s emergency manager law, which has nothing to do with hurricanes or earthquakes, tornadoes. It has to do with financial emergencies. And under this law, the governor can appoint an emergency manager who comes in and can take over school districts, cities, counties that are at risk of being insolvent. And these emergency managers have complete control. They can break collective bargaining agreements. They can take away health care benefits from retirees. They can abolish existing ordinances. They can create new ordinances. Now, city councils, school boards, boards of supervisors still exist, but they really have zero power. They can take a vote to do something, but if the emergency manager doesn’t agree with it, he can overturn it. So essentially what has happened is that democracy gets taken away and an austerity-driven autocracy is put in its place. I was hired to write about what happens when that is done. Brought me up to Flint, Michigan, which had been under emergency management since 2011. And in 2014, one of these appointed emergency managers unilaterally made the decision in order to save $5 million to switch from the Detroit system, which had been providing Flint with clean, safe water for 50 years, in order to save $5 million while a new pipeline was being built, decided unilaterally to switch to the Flint River. Flint is a city like the other cities taken over by these emergency managers, a majority African-American with high poverty rates. 40% of the people of Flint live below the poverty line. Flint is the home of birthplace of General Motors. Used to be a thriving industrial town, 200,000 people. Now it’s 100,000, less than 100,000 people. And so there’s all sorts of financial struggles going on there. The Flint River was sometimes referred to as GM’s sewer. It was not a clean source of water, but that didn’t really matter. The emergency manager is there for one reason, to balance the books. It’s interesting that under the law, with all these powers these emergency managers have, there’s just one thing that the law says they cannot do, which is they cannot miss a bond payment. That’s the bottom line. The banks get paid above all else, no matter what else, even if it means people get poisoned, which is what happened in Flint. After the switch over to the river, people immediately knew the water was no good. It smelled bad, tasted bad, looked bad. Government kept saying it was safe. People’s hair started falling out in clumps. They got these rashes that dermatologists couldn’t really diagnose or treat. There was other ailments. There was noticeable problems with the water. First, there was E. coli, because the Flint water treatment plant didn’t know what they were doing. For 50 years, all they had to do was get the water coming from Detroit that’s already treated, add some chlorine, and send it on its way. They went from that to this very, very complicated task of treating river water, which changes all the time based on temperature and rainfall in the spring when the snow melts and the salt that they use to de-ice the roads gets into the water. All these things. It’s constantly changing. We’re not prepared to do it. As a matter of fact, one of the emails that we obtained, the manager of the plant says, we’re about to switch over and we’re not prepared to do it, but the people calling the shots are going to have us go ahead and do it anyhow. There was another problem with the E. coli, because they didn’t know how to treat the water. They had to issue boiled water notices because of bacterial contamination. Then they started up in the chlorine to deal with the E. coli and the increased chlorine led to creation of a carcinogenic byproduct of chlorine called Total Trihalomethane, which is, you know, causes cancer. That was in the water at elevated levels for nine months before the people of Flint were told about that. That was in January of 15, which is when I started to go up there, because essentially my beat is emergency management. Anywhere that emergency management is in play is part of what I was assigned to cover. The first meeting I went to, townspeople were incredibly upset to find out that there was cancer causing agent in their water. The emergency manager, fourth emergency manager was there. People were saying, why don’t you tell us about the TTHMs? He replies, as soon as we found out about it, we started acting upon it. Yeah, but that’s not telling us about it. As soon as we found out about it, we started acting upon it. Yeah, but why don’t you tell us? Well, I’m telling you now, and that just showed such callous disregard for the interest of the people that he’s supposed to be there serving. It was like, man, this got to start digging into this. This is got to find out what’s going on here. A young filmmaker, a very talented documentary filmmaker named Kate Levy and I teamed up. We did a short documentary drawing the links between emergency management and what was going on and just really letting people talk about what they were enduring because they were not getting a lot of, people were not taking them seriously. Oh, there’s just these crazy moms that are all, you know, flying off the handle about these health concerns, but it’s not really legitimate. And so we gave them a voice and we told their story. And right around the time that that documentary was released, this water expert for the US EPA named Miguel del Toro, who was really one of the unsung heroes in all this, had been working with one of these moms and hooked up with this other, he’s a well-sung hero at this point, Mark Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech who was responsible for uncovering the lead crisis in Washington, DC in the early 2000s. So del Toro hooked up the mom, Leanne Walters, with Mark Edwards. He sent sample bottles to her house so they could test her water because she didn’t trust what the city was telling her. And they tested her water and they found lead levels of 13,200 parts per billion in one of the samples. So to just give you an idea, the federal action level is 15 parts per billion. At 5,000 parts per billion lead, water is classified as hazardous waste. So they had levels two and a half times hazardous waste in some of the samples going into their water. Del Toro wrote a memo and he’s saying this is happening because he had learned that Flint under the direction of the state was not applying corrosion control to the water. So they went from a clean source of water that was low corrosion that was having corrosion control applied to it to the Flint River, which is many, many times more corrosive than the Detroit water. So at a time when corrosion control was more necessary than ever, they weren’t adn’t it. And so as a result, it was tearing up the pipes, which was why the water was coming out red looking. It was the rust was being dislodged because it was not being adhered to the pipes, which was the corrosion control did. He said this isn’t a problem with just this one house. The science says that this is a problem throughout the city. It’s very high probability that there’s going to be lead leaching into the water from these lead service lines, which is a service line down the middle of street is a water main and off of that main teach house is a service line. And in older cities, they tend to be made of lead. It was also lead in people’s plumbing. So the untreated water was causing lead to leaching into the water according to Del Toro, who having been in the EPA for a long time was concerned that this memo was going to get watered down and buried in the bureaucracy. To prevent that from happening, he gave a copy of it to this mom, Leanne Walters, who because of our documentary and our willingness to tell the truth on their part, she gave us the memo. We published it. I wrote a story about it and that really set off the chain reaction that led us to where we are now. But initially, the state denied there was a problem. The head of the communications for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said, when it comes to lead in people’s water, the people of Flint can just relax. There’s no lead problem here. We’re testing it. It’s fine. They called Del Toro a rogue employee. The memo wasn’t vetted. It doesn’t really have any credence. Don’t pay any attention to it. So at that point, what we had on my hands was he said, she said story. This one water expert at the EPA says there’s a problem. The MDEQ with all its testing says there’s not a problem. How do you get to the truth? I was sitting there thinking one night, well, maybe we can do our own tests of the water. And so I called Edward, started talking to him, found out how much it would cost, started talking to residents that I had known as sources. You think we could pull this off? Edward’s applied for a National Science Foundation grant, got the money to pay for 300 test kits to be sent to Flint. And I was kind of coordinating this, talking to the residents. The kits arrived. We were filming this as we went along to document what happened. There’s this one clip where one of these activists, Nayira Sharif, is in the basement of this church. Sorry, I get a little choked up over this part always, no matter how many times I tell this, because it’s just so moving. She’s in the basement of the church, surrounded by all these boxes with the sample kits and says, we’re going to get to the truth about what’s in our water. And we did. We distributed the sample kits, collected them, worked like crazy over a two-week period, told people how to do it. At a certain point, we sat down and saw where kits had been distributed, and then went out knocking on doors to areas that were being underrepresented to make sure that we were not leaving ourselves open to any criticism. Oh, you guys just cherry-picked or something and, you know, skewed the results. Which, while these was going on, I was conducting a parallel investigation into find out what was going on with the city and state tests that allowed them to claim that the water was safe. And filing foyers, going out knocking on doors, and, you know, what we found out is that they were cheating and cheating in a lot of different ways. These are supposed to be scientifically rigorous studies that they’re conducting, and they’re supposed to only test houses that are high risk, meaning lead service lines or lead plumbing. Instead, the DEQ, while these tests were underway, said you have a lot of homes under the action level right now. If any more come in above the action level, you’re going to be out of compliance, which means that they would have to start replacing these lead service lines at a huge expense. So in a city with an emergency manager who’s there to balance the books appointed by the governor, the MDEQ run by a pointee, the governor essentially conspired to rig the tests so the results came in low. One of the things that happened was that the city sent someone out knocking on doors to collect samples in areas where they knew that the lead results were going to be low, often non-detected, because they had put in a new water main within recent years. Just going out and knocking on doors, I found that out. So we hold a press conference in September. Edwards comes in from Virginia Tech, says we’re finding lead levels way above the action level. I get out there and say the reason for the discrepancy between what Virginia Tech is finding and what the city and state are saying is that the city and state are cheating on their tests. We think there needs to be an investigation into what’s going on here, an outside independent investigation. Again, the MDEQ denied there was a problem. They tried to attack the credibility of Edwards, who is one of the most ethical, altruistic people that you could ever meet. But as a result of our test, a doctor at Hurley Medical Center in Flint analyzed blood samples from kids under the age of five. And she looked at a nine-month period before the switch to the river and a nine-month period after the switch to the river and found that after the switch to the river, the percentage of kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood doubled. And in the areas where we found the highest levels of lead in the water, the percentage of kids with elevated blood levels nearly tripled. And that was kind of the game changer. It was one thing to say that there’s lead in people’s water. It was another thing to say there’s lead in the blood of your children. And it has a devastating effect on kids. Kids that are lead poisoned, they have lower IQs, they have learning disabilities, they have behavioral problems, the kind of kids that end up in the school to prison pipeline. And the kids in Flint already have an uphill battle. This is just, was devastating. And by this, this story took a long time to get traction. There were really very few news outlets that covered it when I first reported on the memo. Local media were there to cover when we held our press conference. But then the Hurley study really pushed things over the edge. And then shortly after that, a new mayor, because the old mayor was voted out because he kept saying the water was safe, things, the new mayor declared a state of emergency and the story exploded. I started calls from the Washington Post and all over. And then Rachel Maddow’s show started covering it. And Michael Moore came to town. Even though back in July, I was emailing Moore saying, man, there’s a big issue here. We could really use your help to try attention to it. No response. But the story in December and January exploded. Cover of Time magazine, People magazine, everybody started to come in and write about the issue. But I wouldn’t be here today. The world would not know about the Flint crisis is what everybody refers to. It’s really a disaster. Completely avoidable man made disaster because they were trying to save a few million bucks. And they cause these kids to be poisoned by the government that’s supposed to be there to protect them by pursuing austerity. And it’s an outrage. And now the FBI and the Justice Department have launched criminal investigations. The Michigan Attorney General’s Office is investigating. Five people have resigned, including the regional head of the EPA and the director of the MDEQ. And the guy that told people the water was safe is out of a job. And other people have been fired as a result. And news organizations from all over are investigating. The governor has been forced to release documents. In Michigan, the governor is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. But because of all the public pressure and outrage over this has been releasing documents. I just found out today some incriminating stuff is just coming out. So the investigation is ongoing. Now, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the power of storytelling at this. But there’s another power. And it’s just the power of investigating and earthing the truth. Because the truth is a very, very, very powerful thing when it’s unleashed. And that is what happened in Flint because residents there refused to believe the lie that their water was safe. Thank you.