Protests, Water Deliveries Continue In Flint
FLINT (WWJ) -- The Flint water crisis is a controversy that isn't letting up. People and organizations from around the state and the country are chipping in to help the struggling city find answers while supplying residents with clean drinking water.
About 60 people holding signs and chanting for clean water rallied outside Flint's City Municipal building on Monday. Among those who voiced their discontent was Flint resident Aaron Mason, who said he can't believe the cost of his monthly water bill for water he can't even drink.
"About an average of $100 a month -- that's terrible," Mason told WWJ Newsradio 950's Jason Scott. "My water bill hasn't changed. It's terrible."
Some protesters blamed not only corroded pipes for the tainted water, but also the tearing down of homes that may have leached lead into the Flint River, which was used as the city's water supply from 2014 until October.
"Our government tore down over 500 houses in Flint," one demonstrator said. "Most of those houses were made back in 1930. What's in those houses? Lead, asbestos. What do they do to tear them down? They take a water hose -- a fire hose -- to keep the dust down. Where does it go? It goes in the rivers, doesn't it?"
Residents expressed their gratitude to those who donate time, money and drinking water to people who don't know where their next glass of clean water will come from.
One Detroit church delivered over 87,000 bottles of drinking water to its sister church in Flint on Monday. Charles H. Ellis III, senior pastor at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, was among those who accompanied two semi-trailers of water to the Bethlehem Temple of Flint.
"We will visit this again really soon," Ellis III said. "To put three cases of water in someone's car -- that looks like a lot. It might be gone in three days. It might be gone in two days. So I don't think we can wash our hands, go back to Detroit and say, 'hey, man, we did our part.'
"We did a part, and we can do another part," Ellis III added.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced Monday that former prosecutor and former head of the Detroit FBI Todd Flood will lead an investigation into how the water crisis started and went ignored for so long.
