Introduction to the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive

What is the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive? 

The Flint Water Crisis Public Archive is an ongoing project to make information about the water crisis more accessible. By featuring public records and community member contributions, the archive will give insight into the events before, during, and after the city’s switch to the Flint River in April 2014.

That month, state-appointed emergency managers switched Flint’s drinking water source to the Flint River, triggering the Flint Water Crisis. For the first time in fifty years, the city had to start treating water from a corrosive, unstable water source, with an understaffed, underprepared water plant and vulnerable infrastructure. It took over a year of resident complaints and community advocacy for the state of Michigan to finally acknowledge the warning signs in water quality. In early October 2015, the state announced that Flint’s water was not safe to drink and let Flint return to its original safe drinking water source. By then, the river water had corroded water lines and degraded the city’s entire water distribution system. In addition to poisoning many Flint residents with lead, the water had also exposed them to toxic bacteria, treatment byproducts, and other contaminants. (For more, see Background on the Flint Water Crisis [hyperlink to Background on the Flint Water Crisis] 

In October 2015, the media picked up the story with what eventually became thousands of news articles: academics, professionals, and the public churned out reports and commentaries. There was so much coverage that the underlying story became muddy. It has become difficult to find a complete and accurate account of what happened or to access primary documents to conduct original research. 

At its heart, this crisis has been about information: about access to information; about who is believed; and about how evidence is interpreted, ignored, or contested through competing stories and explanations. These conflicts are still ongoing, and relevant information remains hard to access. Likewise, there is currently no central place where records, documents, and other materials from the water crisis are held. 

In this joint project, academic researchers and community members are creating an archive of materials to help preserve community memory and access to important records. This website provides a location for the public to read these documents, which feature a wide variety of materials. We are also creating exhibits to provide context to this information and help suggest directions for research.

Email Archive

 Our first website iteration focuses on a database we have constructed to access a over 40,000 emails from a 455,000-page government email archive the State of Michigan released in 2016. This email archive has proved critical to our collective understanding of the crisis but has been extremely difficult to navigate until now.  (Please see Email Archive [hyperlink to Email Archive] for more information about this archive and Database Construction [hyperlink to Database Construction] for more information on how we built the database.)

We have developed several tools for navigating this database. With our email search tool [[hyperlink to query tool], users can search by sender and receiver, subject matter, and period, see trends in conversations, and read through relevant email threads and attachments (access to more attachments will be added in the future). Our Calendar tool [hyperlink to Calendar tool] provides another way to engage with this data, browsing emails sent on each date between 2011 and 2016. Users can also browse email senders and receivers [hyperlink to People].

Document Archive

In parallel to this work with the email corpus, we have also begun collecting additional documents available online as a parallel digital archive to be hosted at UM-Flint’s Genesee Historical Collections Center (GHCC) [hyperlink to https://libguides.umflint.edu/ghcc]. In addition to expanding access to the full email database, the archive is also assembling a collection of thousands more public records to be made accessible for research. These documents include reports, resolutions, and financial information, as well as an archive generated by the Environmental Protection Agency documenting Michigan and Flint’s long-term response to their emergency order about the water crisis. These records were already publicly available, but not collated or preserved for long-term access. 

Exhibits

In addition to these two document archives, our research team is creating exhibits that help guide users through the data and illustrate its significance. Our collections of documents, interactive visualizations, and explanatory essays and exhibits will reflect our ongoing research using the data. Exhibit construction is ongoing, so please check back or sign up here [hyperlink to Contribute] for updates.

Oral Histories and Resident Donations

Flint residents and others are also welcome to archive any materials relating to the crisis (whether digital or physical) at the GHCC, where they will be digitized if necessary and made available online through finding aids. 

At the GHCC, we are also conducting an oral history project where Flint residents can share their perspectives and experiences. Transcripts and audio of these oral histories will be made available on our website and at the GHCC. For more information or to schedule an appointment to do an oral history, please go here [link to Contribute].

The archive is still growing and will respond to the interests of community members. Please contact us [link to Contact Us] if you are interested in contributing materials or memories.

Who runs the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive? 

This project is part of a larger collaboration between the Flint Democracy Defense League, the Genesee Historical Collections Center, and researchers at the University of Iowa. (For more information, please see About Us [hyperlink to About Us].)