 This is the show on books that we think you should read. I'm your host, Mihaila Stoops, and today we're going to discuss Anna Clark's book, Poison City. This is the story of the water problems in Flint, Michigan. And to discuss this book, I've invited Kathy Davy, Juris Doctor, and also former counsel for, I should say, inside counsel for the city of Tampa Water Department. Kathy is also a fellow West Naval Club member and real estate agent in Hawaii. Kathy, thank you so much for joining me today. Great, thanks for having me here. Well, one thing that I thought after reading this book is that I'm definitely taken for granted a clean cup of water. And I've taken for granted public water systems. So why don't we discuss, why don't we start this discussion with three minutes, one on one on public water systems, because that's your expertise, right? Right, so I got into water as an attorney. First, I got into water conservation. And the water department director asked me, why are you interested in water conservation? And I said, I used to live in a Zapotec Indian village in Mexico, and you had to carry every drop of water about a quarter of a mile. I said, I know what water is. I appreciate it. And right at the beginning of the book, the author notes that water systems are magical. And they really are. We take it so much for granted. We turn on the tap, clean water comes out, and most people have no idea about the complexity of running a water utility. For example, it's heavily regulated by the federal government through the Safe Drinking Water Act. And you have thousands of miles of pipes. A water company or a water utility can make up to 40,000 tests of water quality every year, 9,000 samples, and maintain the pipes, maintain the biology, maintain the chemistry, prevent the pipe from deteriorating with acidic or alkaline water. And there are a slew of engineers, biologists, chemists. It's a huge, huge undertaking. And most people just take it for granted, especially in the United States. Well, so it takes a lot of people to make it happen. And, but then it seems to me based on the book is that there were a few people that made the wrong decisions. And also there were a few people that kept to their morals and their ethics and they just did what was right. So in light of what happened in Flint, do you have more confidence in the local authorities, state, federal authorities, and the professionals they employ? Do you become a cynic or is there a silver lining here? I think what was interesting in the book, there's the bad guys and the good guys in this book. And the bad guys were elected officials who were very short-sighted and think about getting re-elected. And in this instance, the city of Flint had been put under an emergency manager because Michigan at that point in the city of Flint was falling apart economically. And this was a non-elected official. So you had a non-elected official and then you have normally elected officials and they're making economic decisions. And then on the flip side, the good guys or the heroes in this case, you have the water quality engineers who kept saying, we're not ready to switch off of Detroit system and onto our own system. And in my experience, the engineers were the ones that were really serving the public. They had an extreme duty to make sure the water was safe. And the elected officials in Flint and in my experience, they were worried about not raising the water rates, making sure they got re-elected. And the water engineers and wastewater and stormwater, all the engineers trying to make the utility work were just nickel and dime by budgetary constraints. And that was the problem here too. And obviously these elected officials, they were experts at, I guess, working the system and manipulating the data, like when it came to number of tests and interpreting test results and things like that. Right, in this case, what I found interesting is that the Michigan Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA, which is overtop EPA, the federal agency, has underneath it the state agencies, and both the federal EPA and the Michigan Environmental Protection Agency, both of those agencies, which are typically very, very concerned about water quality issues, they dropped the ball. And so I found that interesting. They're typically very, very dedicated people in that area. And in this case, in Michigan, there was one guy who wrote a report and stood up to everybody and his report got buried. So I found that interesting that there weren't more environmental engineers or staff members that stuck up for the city of Flint. For me, there is a silver lining in the story. And that is, it only takes a handful of people to do the right thing. It starts with one and then it's like the snowball effect. There's another one that decides to do the right thing and so on. So to me, it's very important to read what happened in Flint and learn from that experience, but it's inspiring activism. Right, in this case in Flint, it was almost the perfect storm of failure of a utility system. First, you had the fact that the city of Flint used to be an automotive capital of the United States of the world, actually, in terms of manufacturing the auto industry, which takes huge amounts of water. So the auto industry had dedicated pipelines and then you had what happened in the 60s as part of suburbia growing, you had what's typically known as white flight. So you had a lot of wealth leaving the inner core of the city and moving out to the suburbs. And on top of that, you had a poor inner city. And when Michigan started to go bankrupt and the city of Flint went bankrupt, there wasn't a strong economic base. There wasn't, frankly, as the author points out, there wasn't a bunch of wealthy white people to say, hey, there's something wrong with our water. So you had a failing infrastructure, you had a poor, mainly African-American community, you had rich white people fleeing to the suburbs. So all of this was happening in the 60s. And at the same time, you had the environmental movement starting. So you had environmental protections coming down. So all of these things happened at once. And what people don't realize, they pay for water, but they also have to pay their share of the infrastructure. And you see this a lot when people get solar roofing, solar panels, they say, hey, why do I still have to pay the utility for my electricity? I have solar panels. So even if you have, if you're self-sufficient in solar, you still have to pay your share of the infrastructure, of all the electric grid that gets you the ability to maintain your system and sell electricity back. And it's the same thing with the water system. And if your bigger customer, like the auto industry, abandons their share of the infrastructure, all of that cost goes on to the residents. And in this case, it was poor inner city residents. I wanna go back to your, I guess you called it the perfect storm. And I couldn't agree more. And it made me wonder how many of these perfect storms may be waiting to happen around the country because some of the, of course, we don't have declining for our industry everywhere, but we have some of the other elements, the segregation, the growth of the suburban areas and also, of course, the aging, the cast iron pipes, lead pipes and so on. So it is, how probably it is that it may be repeating somewhere else. I think because of Flint, the Safe Drinking Water Act has gotten even stricter. So the problems they had with lead pipes is being addressed, but the infrastructure costs and the infrastructure itself is failing. Many of the infrastructure, not only water systems, stormwater systems, but if you look at the US highway systems, a lot of these systems were built in the 60s. And in water systems, for example, where I worked in the city of Tampa, a lot of the pipes were cast iron. The life of a cast iron pipe is about 30 years. So in Tampa, the pipes are put in in the 20s and they still haven't been replaced. And this is happening all over the country. There's not enough money in the budget to do systematic replacement of pipes. So what happens is water department directors try to stretch the length of service of a pipe. So what they do, and this is part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, they put down a layer of calcium inside a pipe. They make hard water. So this puts down calcium inside of the pipe and it helps protect the pipe from breaking and leaking. But the cost is astronomical. For example, to replace one mile of a major water main is about a million dollars. And if the city has 2000 miles of pipes, you can see that the federal funding and city funding is not adequate to replace these systems. And, you know, I was checking what's the latest on what happened in Flint. And I learned that a few weeks ago, at least seven individuals were discharged from their felony accusations in this whole tobacco. And it makes me wonder, okay, you know, we all have probably the same thing in common. We have a lot in common with that situation here in Hawaii. You have a lot of aging of past iron pipes that need to be replaced sooner rather than later. And a lot of developments in community associations are going through that. And, but what is the incentive for these elected officials to do the right thing when there's no consequences? It seemed like they're all, you know, for them, there were no consequences. Maybe, I don't know. I hope that they feel guilty about it even if they're not legally responsible. Right. I think, I mean, it is a hard balance between, partly because the short-sightedness of elected officials, not all of them, but if you're running every four years, it's hard to think about, I need to replace this water pipe and it's gonna be good for the next 30 years. I think the attempted prosecution of some of those that blatantly ignored the test or actually cheated on the test for Flint should be a warning to other elected officials. But I mean, that's the danger of, and I guess that's one of the problems with our system is the need to do the right thing versus budgetary constraints. But even here, for example, in Honolulu, there's recently been the Red Hill contamination of the aquifer by the Navy. And here, again, you have the hero of the moment is the chief engineer of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. And he stood up to the Navy and he stood up to all that political pressure and he said, no, you're gonna shut down the well and you're gonna clean it up and you're gonna do it now. And I think if it's a case of extreme pollution or a case of the city of Flint with lead poisoning and other problems with the water, for example, they let the chlorine lapse and then that caused the Legionnaires to disease outbreak as well. So the fine balance, I think you need to get elected officials behind it and campaign on prevention, prevention of harm and the health and safety of the citizens. But that's hard. And I think the author mentions that there's never a ribbon cutting when you do a new water pipe. If you build a library or put a wing on a hospital a lot, everybody comes out and they cut the ribbon and there's great applause and money is raised for a new symphony hall but nobody cheers and says, wow, look, a new four-inch water made. So I think it's interesting. It's so invisible like the author pointed out. It's so invisible, it's almost magic. We just take it for granted. We don't see it, we don't think about it. It's not visible, it's all underground. And I think that's one of the problems with celebrating the magic of safe water. And I feel that we don't have enough experts in this area either. I feel like, none of these kids going to college right now are saying, I wanna become a hydrologist or I wanna become a water quality engineer. It requires a lot of skill and a lot of competence, right? But yet, these are not glamorous jobs. Right, they're non-glamorous but I think they attract people with a great sense of duty and public service. And I find it disheartening when people say, oh, they're a government worker as if government workers don't care. And I think most of them are incredibly dedicated and they wanna do the right thing especially if you get to a highly specialized field like water quality assurance. I know this job often requires a PhD in biology or chemistry, microbiology. Sometimes you have to be an engineer and a PhD. So these are, as you mentioned, they're very high jobs that require high education and the pay is quite well. It's about, if you're a water quality assurance officer at least in Florida, it's about $170,000 a year as your salary, but you're right. It's not something that you go to career day at school when somebody says, how about being a civil engineer? It's not glamorous. Everybody says, do you wanna be a doctor or a lawyer? But engineering or lab work is typically not, at least when I was in school, that wasn't anything I've heard about in career day. So we don't have enough clean water and we basically don't have enough fresh water too. During my last show where I had a discussion with retired major general, John Harold about threatens to US and we discussed mostly about security threats and I've asked him, where does he see US in the next 20 years? What would be the biggest issue for United States? And I was surprised by his answer. It wasn't the country, we're an entity. His answer was fresh water challenges. So it really got me thinking about, how again, how important this is for not for US on me, but I think the entire world. Yes, one of the posters I had in my office, it was a remittin painting and it was called the fight for the waterhole. And it had guys in the wild west, they had their kind of stow the wagging surrounding the waterhole and they were protecting it from the Native Americans. And even back then in the wild west, there was a saying that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. And I think that's another thing that we take for granted. For example, in Hawaii, how many thousands of population can these aquifers serve before they start to get depleted? And many states, especially along the eastern seaboard, they've pumped so much water out of the aquifer that they're getting saltwater intrusion. And once you get saltwater into an aquifer, you can't really clean it. It's the same with Red Hill, they polluted an aquifer here, they polluted some wells. And if we pump, if the water department or the border water supply engineer explained, if we pump the other wells harder to make up for it, there's the problem of drafting the contaminants into the other wells or into the aquifer. So it's an incredible problem in the United States. If you look at the west, some of those aquifers have been drawn down about 300 feet. So the many areas in the Midwest are at risk of running out of potable water. And the water department director I worked for said, it's time to move to Canada because Canada is going to be supplying the U.S. with fresh water. They have low population and a huge amount of fresh water supply. So water is much more valuable than gasoline or any of the fossil fuses because there's no replacement. With fossil fuses, you can replace it with solar or wind. There is no replacement for potable water. There's nothing. Yes, and that I don't wanna end this show on a sad note here. I just wanna say that for me, this book was very well written. I learned a lot from it. There wasn't anything in particular that I feel like I need like, oh, maybe I should look into this. This doesn't sound true or how did you see it? It was incredibly well researched. I was impressed that the, I think the footnotes at the back of the book are about a quarter of the book itself. But the research into the Safe Drinking Water Act, the research into civil rights, the segregation, all facets of the book were incredibly well researched. And then the nuances of politics. And it's very hard to find some of that information. It was interesting also in talking about the, quote, heroes of the book, the press and especially Michigan Public Radio. And it was interesting to me that the public radio station was able to continue with the story. And that was one thing that's hard about water. If there's water contamination, the amount of time and the number of years it takes to actually bring a case. And there's a saying in law that justice delayed is justice denied. And I think that that's one of the problems with Flint and with any type of pollution, the evidence and the years and years of lawsuits and water testing and following the growth of development of a child that has been contaminated with lead poisoning, all of those things that take time. And the attention span of the American public to follow a story from, you know, little Johnny that's three-year-old that has lead poisoning and now he's seven and he's having problems in school to keep the public's attention on something like polluted water supply is very hard to do. If you look at the news, there sound bites, the stories are 30 minutes. And I mean, 30 seconds. So it's incredibly hard in these environmental justice cases to continue the interest of the public. And if a case takes seven years to bring to court and elected officials only there before. So it's very hard to keep up the, to get the public interested and keep up that interest so that justice is served. That's a very good point. It's, you know, it's a long haul issue. Yeah, it's a long-term problem that we should not find a short-term solution to. Well, Kathy, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been wonderful. And thank you for all of your insights and your expertise that added to what the book brought to me and to our readers, you know, particularly given what's happening in Hawaii, you should read this book. I was gonna say, I don't think anybody should be put off about the title, The Poison City, and it's about water and, you know, water systems. The book is so well-read. It's a page turner. It's a thriller. It's an investigative story. So I think, I tell the readers, not to be put off by the fact that it's dealing with utility systems or water testing because it is, it's a mystery. It's a modern mystery. There are good guys, there are bad guys. There's investigative reporters. There's community activists. And it all comes together. And it's a story of all American cities, any American city. And I think that's one of the things it is so well-written. It is, it's an exciting read. And, you know, I know I'm a water nerd. So for me, I found it fascinating. But I think for anybody, it's the investigation that the author does. It's just amazing and how she pulls it all together with the historical references. So it's not just for nerds. It's, yeah. And it's not fiction. It's, it happened. And we have a lot to learn from what happened there. So thank you again, Kathy. And until next time, we hope.