In August of 2015, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha hosted a barbecue. One of her friends since childhood, Elin Betanzo, attended; Elin had just moved back to Michigan after working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for many years. She confided in Mona about a former colleague of hers, Miguel Del Toral, who’d discovered that there was lead in the water in Flint. The city, which was under the control of an emergency manager who’d been appointed to cut costs in the city’s budget, had recently switched its water source from the Detroit River to the Flint River, which was once a toxic waste dumping site. The water that was being piped in from the Flint River wasn’t being treated with corrosion control chemicals—and so the water, which was naturally corrosive, was leaching lead from old pipes into the homes of thousands of Flint residents. Mona was shocked and appalled—especially because so many of her patients were newborns who got their nutrition from formula made with warm tap water. Elin warned Mona that the EPA and state authorities like the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) were working to cover up Miguel’s research.
Mona sent emails and made calls to county health officials, desperate to talk to someone about the crisis. But no matter how many people connected to state and city infrastructure she got in touch with, she couldn’t get any answers. Knowing that Flint’s long history of environmental injustice, anti-Black racism, and precarious economy since the shuttering of the General Motors plants in the area, Mona realized that no one was going to take a stand for Flint. She would have to collect her own data and fight for Flint herself with a small team of trusted colleagues.
Mona began examining blood-lead data collected from patients at her own clinic and teamed up with one of the hospital’s research coordinators, Jenny LaChance, to refine the study. As soon as Jenny ran the numbers, it became clear that there were more children with elevated lead levels since the city switched its water supply. Jenny got to work putting in a request for institutional review board approval so that they could access more patient records throughout the county—but when Mona heard that Marc Edwards, an environmental activist and whistleblower, was meeting resistance from the MDEQ in his own study on Flint’s water, she began to realize that there would be a long battle ahead.
Mona continued reaching out to colleagues at her own hospital and other medical facilities throughout Flint, alerting people to the situation and asking for their help in securing blood-lead data from the county and the state. One of the people she reached out to was Marc Edwards himself, and when she hinted at the results of her and Jenny’s research, Marc told her the data she had could be a “game changer.” But almost every interaction Mona had with city, county, state, and federal officials was a dead end. Nevertheless, Mona and Jenny secured IRB approval and added a sample size to their study. They continued gathering incriminating data about how the residents of Flint—most of them Black and low-income, already victims of “environmental injustice”—were being poisoned by the very people who were supposed to be looking out for them.
Mona eventually secured a meeting with the mayor, Dayne Walling, and began working on a presentation that would outline her and Jenny’s findings. Marc helped Mona prepare for the meeting, but Mona was afraid of bringing aeb (“shame”) to her family. But then she remembered the stories she’d heard growing up of her maternal great-uncle Nuri Rufail Koutani, a leftist organizer who fought for Iraqi independence in the 1920s and 1930s. Bolstered by her family’s history of challenging injustice, Mona went into the meeting with confidence and high expectations. She was devastated when the mayor, the Flint city manager Natasha Henderson, and the head of the public works department Howard Croft reacted to her presentation with skepticism and inaction. Mona and her team told the mayor that if they didn’t receive a guarantee that he’d release a public health advisory within 48 hours, they would take their research public at an independent press conference. She waited anxiously for word from the mayor’s office—but when none came, she knew that she was on her own. Just days later, with help from Flint state senator Jim Ananich and a number of reporters, Mona delivered a televised press conference that revealed to the country what was truly happening in Flint.
The backlash began almost immediately—the city announced its own press conference and began working right away to discredit Mona’s research. But rather than surrender to despair, Mona decided to further refine her research with the help of geographic information systems software that would prove an indisputable link between the blood-lead levels in Flint residents and the untreated water flowing through their pipes. She began planning ways to get bottled water and filters to Flint’s families, and she spoke to the press in frequent interviews as she underscored the government’s negligence.
On October 1st, in a surprising reversal, the Genesee County Health Department declared a public health emergency and hosted a news conference in which they admitted that the state’s research did show a spike in Flint residents’ blood-lead levels. But the state still didn’t admit their fault in the crisis, and they put forward an action plan that was hollow and empty. Later, Mona would learn that Flint officials knew about the risks of failing to add corrosion control to the water all along—but they continued cutting corners and ignoring red flags all the same.
On October 8th, the city announced that the water source would be switched back to the Detroit River. With this aspect of the problem solved, Mona and her team turned their focus to securing more attention, social support, and federal funding for Flint. They legitimized their data by publishing it in a prestigious medical journal and cheered as organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Resources Defense Council pressured city, county, and state officials to answer for their neglect. Mona submitted a list of demands to the federal government’s Emergency Operations Center, urging them to create initiatives that would invest in the futures of Flint’s most vulnerable children. She also testified before Congress and received an in-person apology from Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan.
Mona then watched as a Flint water task force released a detailed report about what happened in Flint—and who should be held accountable. Flint received $200 million in federal aid; corrupt officials at the MDEQ and other city officials lost their jobs; and some faced charges of involuntary manslaughter. Mona urged her patients’ parents to hang onto high hopes for their children’s futures—the badness they’d all been subjected to, she assured them, could still be overcome with goodness.
One night later that year, Mona listened from her home office as her mother (whom her daughters Nina and Layla called Bebe) told the girls a bedtime story. The story was about Mona’s grandfather Haji and the loyal flock of birds that he tended in Baghdad. According to the tale, the birds banded together to lift Haji into the air and carry him to safety after an accident in his garden. The story reminded Mona of the need to treat everyone with respect, to look out for one’s community, and to help one another through solidarity and collective action.
