Water Water Everywhere

and you can bet I'm drinking it.

Hey neighbors—

Happy Street Fair Week! It was great to see so many of you at the parade on Friday, and I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to talk with more of you at my upcoming coffee hours in the next week (details below).

I had hoped to be back with some interesting new discussions on how social media hurts our communities in the abstract, but unfortunately we need to deal with a more pressing issue: Wyandotte’s water. I am foregoing any other section of the newsletter in order to get this out to you while it’s being discussed among the broader public, because I have been incredibly frustrated by how these issues have been reported. Conflating the recent Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) corrective action letter with longstanding Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concerns surrounding the BASF property is bad media practice. It makes room for people to think things are much scarier and worse than they are.

So in service of living up to my goal of not complaining about things I don’t intend to help correct, let’s talk about what’s actually happening.

First and foremost, let me be clear: our drinking water is safe and meets quality standards year after year. Anyone saying otherwise is trying to scare you. If you don’t believe me, you can read the water quality reports for the past twenty years at this link. The new report for 2024 was due July 1 and hit everyone’s mailbox last week, and it verified that—fluoride discussions aside—our water continues to be safe and drinkable. If you’re at all worried about the validity of these tests, know that EGLE—the very people who sent us the corrective action letter—reviews our testing regularly, and many of the individual contaminant tests are performed by third party companies to ensure unbiased reporting.

From my reading, the corrective action letter was not meant to indicate any current problems with the water, but to point out from the most conservative, risk-avoidant standpoint what should be fixed with the infrastructure in order to prevent any future problems from arising. Just like any other government audit, the goal is to point out all the things that might go wrong so we can avoid as many worst cases as possible. I applaud Justin Ptak and the water team for getting right to work on their response to the letter, including bringing items forward for council action at our last meeting (see items 17 & 18).

So what’s up with BASF? You may believe BASF to be an incredible corporate partner or an environmental nightmare or something in between. But I am here to deal in facts…and the fact is that 40 years ago, the Detroit River was a polluted mess. My family tells stories of pulling sludge out of the river when they were rowing, of seeing workers dumping unused cans of paint directly into the water. Decades of industry with no limitation led the area to be identified as one of the original 43 Areas of Concern under the 1987 Great Lakes Water Quality Act. Today, thanks to the intervention of the EPA and tireless action of true public servants like the late John Dingell, bald eagles make their home along the river. Things are getting better.

I am not here to carry water for BASF in terms of their ongoing groundwater contaminant issues. They have plenty of money and their own coms people to do so. I have no doubt that they could move more quickly towards remediation and mitigation if they directed funding and staff there—after all, some of the brightest chemical minds in the world make their careers at BASF. And I am sure that profit motive is involved, because that is how corporations—even ones doing cool science—work.

But. If they are following the timeline and projects laid out in their corrective action plan with the EPA and actively working to remediate the remains of Wyandotte Chemical and Pennsalt/Pennwalt, who predated BASF as site owners and certainly contributed some of the worst contaminants, and eagles are living in the river and our drinking water is safe…legally, there’s not much of a case here.

This is exactly why strong federal regulatory agencies like the EPA are so important. They are the watchdogs who ensure that these orders continue to be followed on time. It’s why I’m grateful for EGLE flagging the concerns they did with our system!

Then what’s happening with our water, exactly? Outside of some obviously unforced errors which have since been mitigated by fine mesh and the beginnings of an external audit to review security, what stood out to me in this report was how many problems were signs of age in our water infrastructure. It’s clear that Wyandotte’s water plant is aging. So is the rest of the water infrastructure in Michigan, because our legislative leaders have repeatedly refused to make systemic investments in these vital services. This is not a partisan issue: Democrats oversaw state government during a historic influx of federal dollars and did not choose to make sweeping investments then, and a deeply tax-averse Republican House is unlikely to do so now. We know from the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” this weekend that the federal government is planning to cut investments in safe drinking water nationwide. It’s not a great moment for anything funding-related.

But the reality is that without investment from higher levels of government, nothing at the local level can succeed. People in our income brackets are taxed enough already, and I don’t think any resident—myself most certainly included—could afford to pay the rate increases it would take to overhaul our entire plant and intake system ourselves. We need smart, strong state and national leaders who are going to fiercely advocate for the health and safety of residents through improved funding for water treatment and sanitation. People who can see past culture war nonsense and recognize that we have real problems here.

How can I help? You can share the new water report with any of your friends and neighbors who are feeling unsettled by the reporting. You can call your state and federal electeds and ask them if they intend to advocate for improved water infrastructure in the budget. And, obviously, you can remember this moment when you next vote: is the person you’re casting a ballot for interested in facing hard problems head on, or are they more interested in being a celebrity? Can you rely on them to tell you the truth when the going gets tough, or will they put their ego ahead of people’s need for honesty? Will they prioritize industry at the cost of our natural world, or will they support the regulatory state that brought BASF into a corrective action plan and showed WMS where we need to buff our infrastructure to prevent future problems?

The bottom line: I am incredibly thankful to EGLE for highlighting where improvements are needed, and I am happy to see that our water report—which includes testing from outside sources and is reviewed by EGLE before distribution—continues to show that our water is good to drink. I am less thankful for the way it was reported, which was unnecessarily scary and certainly reads with a lens of wanting Wyandotte to join a larger drinking water consortium, where we would have significantly less control over quality and distribution. And I am putting our elected officials on notice: I will not forget how you vote on this year’s state budget and whether you fight for our water. I hope you won’t either, reader.

Lingering questions? Other thoughts? Join me for one of my July coffee hours! **Please note that we have changed the location for this Thursday’s coffee hour—we will be doing some weeding in front of the Wyandotte Police Station, so meet us there!**