THE VALEDICTORIAN 39
"What is corrosion control?"
The Valedictorian
E LLIOTT AND l HAD BEEN INDOCTRINATED BY OUR PARENTS:
being an Iraqi host means offering your guests more food than
three times as many people could eat. That night was no different.
Elliott finally pulled the slightly charred chicken off the grill, and
our noisy rock band took a break and wandered toward the heaping
platters of food.
As soon as we got the kids settled, cutting up their food into
kid-size pieces, Elin and I found each other again. She talked
quickly, with intensity and passion.
She had seen a memo written by a former colleague of hers,
Miguel Del Tora!, who worked in the Chicago office of the EPA.
He had come to Flint a few months before, after being contacted
directly by a resident who was concerned about her water. He per­
sonally arranged to have an independent test of the tap water in the
resident's home.
"I worked with Miguel. I know Miguel," Elin said. "I trust him.
He wouldn't write this memo if there wasn't a serious problem."
"And?"
"He says that Flint is not using corrosion control."
The urgency on Elin's face was unmistakable, but I was still a
little lost.
A shriek rose up in the next room. The posse of kids was already
restless and returning to the drum set, guitars, keyboards, and kara­
oke.
"A system of Flint's size is required to have corrosion control as
part of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Water is naturally corrosive,
but water systems are supposed to treat the water to reduce corro­
sivity. When you change the source of the water or how it's treated,
this changes the way the water reacts with the pipes-that's what
we learned from the D.C. water crisis."
The D. C. water crisis? I didn't think I'd heard of that. The music
began again, worse and even louder. Elin and I tucked into a deeper
corner of my kitchen. "Whether corrosion is a problem or not de­
pends on what the pipes and plumbing are made of," Elin went on.
"In Flint, the service lines, the pipes that run from the street into
people's homes, are made of lead. And the plumbing inside people's
homes has lead too."
"W:'a1t a second"I
, sai'd"A ·
. re you saymg- "
Elin nodded. "If Miguel's right that Flint is not using corrosion
control, that means there's lead in Flint's water."
"Lead in the water?"
Elin waited a few moments while I processed the news, then
began nodding slowly. "And based on Miguel's memo,"she went on,
"the lead levels in the Flint water are really, really high. He suspects
that MDEQisn't testing correctly.1hat 's why he leaked the memo."
"Are you kidding me?" I shook my head. "Why would anybody
at the EPA need to leak their own memo?"
Elin cocked her head and just stared at me, deadpan. She was
waiting for me to catch up.
"Okay,"I said, moving on. "So how could the testing not be done
ng
· hte."
"MDEQis probably testing for the results they want, which will
underestimate the amount of lead in the drinking water. The loop­
holes in the Lead and Copper Rule allow for that. The utilities do
it all the time-trying to game the regulations and manipulate the