“We have all sorts of people coming in for a hot minute,” MacIntyre said in reference to the parade of activists and politicians rolling through Flint. Rick Snyder (R–Mich.), all the way to President Barack Obama, who visited in May, have appeared before audiences drinking glasses of Flint water in bids to prove its safety. Throughout the water crisis, institutional acknowledgement of health issues stemming from the water supply was often delayed. Cases of water bottles are still common sights everywhere in the city, as are citizens coping with infectious diseases just as headlines of a deadly two-year spate of Legionnaire’s disease seemed to stop, a recent outbreak of shigellosis made the news earlier this month. “We’re scared all the time.”Ī large number of Flint residents, including MacIntyre, do not believe local officials’ assurances that city water - now sourced from Lake Huron through Detroit’s water supply - is safe to drink, though crews of construction workers under directions from Mayor Karen Weaver are working to replace houses’ piping systems. “We’re not getting straight answers,” she said in an interview. Her home’s pipes continue to disintegrate into the walls, and daily life, she says, is rife with a lack of clarity from the government. Her children receive coloring pages at school reminding them to improve their nutrition and hygiene. Her family still drinks, bathes in and washes clothes with bottled water. Nearly six months later, life in Flint has carried on fairly normally for MacIntyre - or as normal as it can be.
“There’s just something about this that’s just, it’s … it’s finally worn me down,” she told local camera crews back in April.
But the discovery of lead in the city’s water more than a year ago was the last straw for her. She’s lived through recessions and subsequent proclamations of the city’s return from funding gaps and what she called a history of neglect. MacIntyre, a University of Michigan-Flint sociology professor, was born and raised in Flint and moved back in 2008.
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