Six years on, Flint works toward justice in water crisis

Water coming from faucets in this city is no longer discolored or malodorous. Truckloads of bottled water from other communities have slowed to a trickle. These improvements do not mean that Flint’s water crisis is over. Instead, a new and uneasy normal has settled in.

“One of the lingering effects is the pall that has been cast over this city,” says the Rev. Deborah Conrad, pastor of Woodside Church, a multidenominational congregation in the heart of downtown Flint. “It’s a kind of a depression, an unwillingness to trust. There are lingering mental and physical effects we cannot measure and won’t know for a long time.”

The persistent mistrust from citizens is directed squarely at government officials who were the key players in what a federal appellate court opinion called “the infamous, government-created disaster commonly known as the Flint Water