The Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America released a statement Feb. 24 on the recent water crisis in Flint, Mich., urging peace-loving Baptists to advocate not only for the people of Flint but also for others dealing with water crises caused by drought, floods and pollution across the continent.
“Water is life, and that is not only a liturgical statement,” said the statement signed by BPFNA Executive Director LeDayne Polaski and Amaury Tañón-Santos, president of the BPFNA-Bautistas por la Paz board of directors. “It is one of the most fundamental realities we share, as humans, with each other and with the created order.”
“Working for peace rooted in justice in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the United States, we call on all peace-loving people to pray for the health of the residents of Flint, and to commit to local action to require the government of Michigan to immediately provide a sustainable source of clean water and infrastructure to them,” the leaders said.
“We also call on all peace-loving people of North America to remember the water crises happening throughout our region with El Niño creating drought conditions in Puerto Rico, northern Mexico and the U.S. West and flooding in southeastern Mexico; with oil extraction in the tar sands region of northern Alberta in Canada polluting nearby waters — a region with profound spiritual and historic significance to Canada’s first peoples — and with the commodification of water which is closing access to clean water to many throughout our region and the world.”
The Flint water crisis took on a “human face,” the leaders said, when children in Flint, predominantly African-Americans living in poverty, “began showing poisonous levels of lead in medical tests.”
“The tragedy of this situation is that this has been years in the making,” the statement said. “It has been documented that the state and private industries in the area knew about this situation and never communicated the risk coming out of people’s faucets.”
To save money, Flint temporarily changed its municipal water source in 2014 to the Flint River rather than the Detroit water system, corroding the city’s aging pipes and releasing lead and other toxins into the water supply.
Within weeks residents begin complaining to local leaders about tainted, foul-smelling tap water and health symptoms such as rashes and hair loss, followed by the discovery of E. coli and coliform bacteria in the Flint water supply.
In 2015 the city issued an advisory warning that water contained high levels of trihalomethanes, byproducts of water-disinfectant chemicals that over time can cause kidney, liver and nervous system damage, posing a possible risk for sick and elderly people but otherwise safe to drink.
Subsequent testing found lead levels 27 times the EPA action threshold, prompting a class action lawsuit last November. In January Gov. Rick Snyder declared a county-wide state of emergency for Flint. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan launched an investigation and the state’s chief medical executive advised residents to use only bottled or filtered water.
On Jan. 27 a coalition of organizations and citizens, including the ACLU and Natural Resources Defense Council, filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to step in to provide Flint with clean drinking water. On Feb. 24 a bipartisan group in the U.S. Senate reached a deal that could provide up to $100 million in subsidized loans or grants for Flint or “any state that receives an emergency declaration … to a public health threat from lead or other contaminants in a public drinking water system.”
The Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America-Bautistas por la Paz offers resources to help individuals and churches to “pray, witness and work for peace as it relates to water,” Polaski and Tañón-Santos said.