----- Original Message -----
From: joe harcz Comcast
To: Sarah Gravetti MISILC DNM
Cc: Christian Simmons ; Rodney Craig MISILC ; Eleanor Canter ; Darma Canter ;
terry Eagle ; Mark Eagle ; Larry Posont NFBMI Pres. ; Georgia Kitchen FANFB ;
Marlene Malloy MCRS Dir. ; BRIAN SABOURIN ; Elmer Cerano MPAS ; Mike Zelley TDN
; Dawn Reamer MSILC ; Leigh Campbell-Earl ; Bill Earl MI ADAPT ; Mark Whalen ;
Norm DeLisle ; Jill Gerrie ; Laura Hall
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2016 10:29 AM
Subject: it's a disability issue too
Check out the hidden issue around the poisoning of our county in this news
story. Each and everyone of these folks are people with disabilities! And
they've got little resources. Moreover, no one is even discussing the impact on
PWD let alone how to get resources directly to them.
The SILC has been discussing emergency preparedness but it's an abstract
exercise. The state of emergency is here and now!
And all I get from BSBP is spin control. Ditto for other entities, let alone
lack of access to timely information!
Joe Harcz
Poisoned water makes some Flint lives even more difficult
John Carlisle,
Detroit Free Press 8:53 a.m. EST February 16, 2016
Lisa Gaines of Flint slowly stands up after cleaningBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint slowly stands up after cleaning Erma Jean Gaines, her
bedridden mother, before paramedics arrive to take her to her dialysis
appointment.
The 70-year-old woman spends her life in the family's dining room. 'If I didn't
own this house I would take off,' said Gaines, who said she developed a
rash on her stomach after bathing in Flint water. 'What I'm hoping is that my
mother and brother can leave here. I do not want them dying in here due to
this water. But I think they will because they are so sick.' Ryan Garza,
Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines of Flint prepares warm tap water to washBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint prepares warm tap water to wash her 70-year-old bedridden
mother Erma Jean Gaines before paramedics pick her up at their home on Flint's
north side to take her to dialysis. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines washes up her 70-year-old bedridden mother,Buy Photo
Lisa Gaines washes up her 70-year-old bedridden mother, Erma Jean Gaines,
before paramedics pick her up at their home on Flint's north side to take her
to dialysis on Tuesday Jan. 26, 2016. Gaines takes care of her mother around
the clock while also taking care of her sickly brother who lives with them.
All of them have developed rashes they say is from using Flint water. Ryan
Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines of Flint swishes around a towel in a bucketBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint swishes around a towel in a bucket of soapy Flint tap
water while preparing to wash up her 70-year-old bedridden mother Erma Jean
Gaines
before paramedics pick her up at their home to take her to dialysis. Ryan
Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines slumps over the railing outside of herBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines slumps over the railing outside of her home on Flint's north side
in exhaustion after washing her 70-year-old bedridden mother and getting her
dressed to go to dialysis. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Michigan State University Law student Amy Scott walksBuy Photo
Michigan State University Law student Amy Scott walks along the streets of
Flint's north side on Friday Jan. 22, 2016 while volunteering to deliver water
filters and bottled water to residents dealing with the Flint water crisis.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Edward Gaines shows the unexplained rash on his backBuy Photo
Edward Gaines shows the unexplained rash on his back at his home on Flint's
north side where he lives with his bed-ridden mother and sister. Ryan Garza,
Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines of Flint hands her bedridden mother a bottleBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint hands her bedridden mother a bottle of water to drink. The
70-year-old woman is bedridden and spends her life in the dining room of
their home. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches as her dog named Pig rubsBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches as her dog named Pig rubs her back on the wooden
floor to relieve the itching from the rash on her back at their home on Flint's
north side on Friday January 22, 2016. Pig developed a rash on her back. Gaines
thinks the dog's health problems might be from drinking Flint tap water.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Fullscreen
Pig rests between bottled water and a water coolerBuy Photo
Pig rests between bottled water and a water cooler in the living room of Lisa
Gaines house on Flint's north side on at their home. Pig rubs her back on
the wooden floor to relieve the itching from the rash on her back. Ryan Garza,
Detroit Free Press
Fullscreen
Flint resident Laura Haley helps with the dishes atBuy Photo
Flint resident Laura Haley helps with the dishes at the Gaines family home on
the north side of Flint. Behind her, a pile of dirty laundry spills into the
kitchen. Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Buy Photo
Fullscreen
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches from her porch as paramedicsBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches from her porch as paramedics carry her mother down
the steps to load onto a gurney to take her to dialysis. Four paramedics
come three times a week to get her 70-year-old bedridden mother out of the
house and down crooked and crumbling steps into an ambulance. Ryan Garza,
Detroit
Free Press
FullsThe family is poor and in bad health. Things got worse when their water
became tainted.
635908185902907662-013015-toxic-environment-rg.jpgBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint slowly stands up after the long process of cleaning and
dressing Erma Jean Gaines, her 70-year-old bedridden mother, in the dining
room of their home.(Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
FLINT – She sat in the wooden chair where she spends most of her time, took a
hit off her cigarette and watched over her helpless mother, who was curled
up in a hospital bed in the dining room.
“We just sit here all day long,” said Lisa Gaines. “She might talk to me, then
again she might not. But she don’t like being left alone.”
Erma Jean Gaines, Lisa’s 70-year-old mother, has been bedridden for five years
now, ever since she broke her foot trying to escape a hospital bed and never
properly healed. Even though she’s thin and frail, everyone still calls her Big
Mama.
“This foot right here don’t turn no more,” Lisa said, reaching down under her
mother’s blanket and pulling out a crooked foot covered with a soft white
footie. Big Mama’s face became a pained wince. “So we can’t take her nowhere.
It’s like we’re stuck.”
The Gaines family lives in a battered little house on Page Street, not far from
downtown. There’s Lisa, 51, whose sole source of income after a car accident
is disability; and her brother Edward, 54, who’s also on disability thanks to
severe diabetes that’s caused him to waste away; and Big Mama, who spends
her life in a bed.
Their neighborhood is rough. Most of the houses are gone. It could be any
inner-city neighborhood anywhere in America, except for one thing — here the
water
is poison.
Like a lot of Flint, where 40% of its nearly 100,000 residents live in poverty,
the Gaines household is poor in money, poor in health, poor in circumstances.
Bringing poisoned water into the mix made already tough lives even more
difficult. And it’s hard to find the line where the poverty ends and the
poisoning
begins.
The bad water has made thousands of poor people like them sick. It’s cost them
more of their scarce money. It forces them to spend far too much time worrying
about something as basic to life as getting safe water. And with nowhere to
move and no money to do so, the Gaines family is trapped at ground zero of
the water crisis.
Lisa lifted up her pant leg and scratched at a dry, white rash. She’s got a
strange rash on her stomach, too. Maybe it’s just the dry skin common to some
diabetics like her.
But she’s convinced it’s from months of showering in Flint water, which the
family still uses because it’s hard to wash yourself one bottle of water at
a time, and because the state keeps telling them it’s safe to use, even though
the water still comes out brown when it first flows from the faucet.
“I know it’s from the water,” Lisa said, still scratching. “And everybody that
said the water’s OK, they need to be made to live here. They’re not bathing
in the water. They’re not drinking the water. If they was here, staying here as
long as we have, they wouldn’t be talking.”
Sick and tired
Lisa was the first one in the family to notice the water’s unusual smell. It
changed a couple years ago, right around April 2014, when the city began drawing
drinking water from the Flint River. But everyone told her it was fine.
Then came the rashes.
Big Mama developed them on her neck and her thighs. Lisa got them, too. Her
brother Edward got painful sores on his back. Her son Patrick, 29, who lived
not far away at the time, got a rash on his chest that only started getting
better when he moved away from Flint and its water supply. And when Lisa’s
daughter Angella, 32, came from California to visit for a few weeks a year ago,
her 3-year-old toddler Austyn developed rashes and sores all over his body.
Then came the stomach aches.
Edward Gaines shows the unexplained rash on his backBuy Photo
Edward Gaines shows the unexplained rash on his back at his home on Flint's
north side where he lives with his bedridden mother and his sister, who takes
care of the two of them. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
Edward used to guzzle water thanks to the excessive thirst of diabetes, and
after months of drinking tap water he developed diarrhea so bad he still has
to wear a diaper all the time. “When he runs, it runs all day long,” Lisa
explained.
Edward shuffled down slowly from his bedroom upstairs. He lifted his T-shirt
and showed the rashes and sores on his back. “It itches and then it burns,”
he said. He weighed 60 pounds more a couple years ago, but his illnesses have
withered him down to a skinny frame.
When the warnings came out about the water, the family tried to adapt. Lisa had
a water company deliver 10 jugs of clean water a month, at her own expense.
The city gave them a filter for the kitchen faucet, at taxpayer expense, though
the water still comes out cloudy. And there’s no shortage of people handing
out bottled water since the crisis broke, trying to play catch up for a delayed
official response.
“Red Cross!” shouted a man at the front door. He was delivering free water to
the few occupied homes on the street. Lisa got up from the chair. “Come here,
mama,” she said to her dog. Around here everybody’s called mama, even Pig the
10-year-old pit bull.
“Wow, look at that dog,” said Darius Lewandowski, a Red Cross volunteer, as the
hobbled old dog wagged her tail and stumbled her way to the door. Lewandowski
seemed genuinely stunned. “When did this happen?”
“This is from the water!” Lisa told him. The old dog wagged her whole body with
her tail. Her back was raw from where she had been biting at her dry skin.
Everybody in the house stopped using the tap water when they found out it was
bad. Everybody except Pig the dog.
Nobody thought at first about giving the dog water from the tap. Until she
couldn’t stand up very well and started stumbling around when she tried to walk.
Until she developed a rash on her back and thick, pink boils appeared all over
her body. “It’s like her skin came outside her fur,” Lisa said.
Maybe she’s just an old dog with old dog problems. But the family insisted she
was healthy until two years ago, right around the time the water was switched.
Pig the dog rests between bottled water and a waterBuy Photo
Pig the dog rests between bottled water and a water cooler in the living room
of Lisa Gaines' house on Flint's north side. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free
Press)
Pig rolled onto her back and began kicking her legs in the air, back and forth,
using the floor to scratch her back, like any dog. Normally this would be
cute. Until she got up and dried flakes of her skin were left on the wood floor
and her back was scraped open again. Pig waddled over to Lisa.
“Come on, mama, it’s OK,” she said, rubbing her behind her ears.
A little help from her friends
As morning turned to afternoon, the family sat around Big Mama’s bed in the
dining room, watching an endless loop of TV shows from the 1970s on one of the
few channels they get. A wire antenna from their $19 TV receiver is strung over
her bed and taped to the far wall.
Laura Haley was washing dishes in the kitchen, using tap water because she
needs the water hot, even though she said the rashes and bumps on her skin were
from the water running over her hands. The 47-year-old family friend lives not
far and walked over to help.
She, too, said her health has collapsed the past two years. “When they first
switched the water I started having problems with my memory, I started getting
dizzy, having trouble with my balance,” Haley said. “I wound up being
hospitalized twice. They didn’t know what was going on.”
Maybe it was mono, the doctors told her. Or her heart. “But it wasn’t my
heart,” she insisted. “They ran all kinds of tests. It’s this water.”
Two years ago, she was going to school at nearby University of Michigan-Flint
for a social work major. She was on the honor roll, she said. But she started
losing her memory, failed her last two semesters, and dropped out in
frustration.
Now she comes by to help out with household chores, or sit with Big Mama a
while, just to give Lisa a little break. “I call her Mama Lisa, because here’s
a woman who’s made a decision to take care of her mother. I’ve lived through
it. I watched my mother go through it with my grandma, and the toll it took
on her being a caregiver, full time, no help from the state, no help from
relatives or friends, nobody. It’s a lot of work and she does this all by
herself.”
She met Lisa decades ago, when Lisa drove an ice cream truck and Haley’s kids
would go nuts whenever they heard the jingle of her arrival.
“My girls was always talking about the ice cream lady, ‘cause there were times
when they didn’t have money for ice cream and she’d give them ice cream anyway,”
Haley said. “So I wanted to meet this lady. And she was a very sweet person,
and we just struck up a friendship from there.”
A pile of laundry spilled from the tiny laundry space into the kitchen, almost
to her feet at the sink. After the dishes she’d turn to washing all the blankets
and pajamas, most of which belong to Big Mama. The family has to put two kinds
of detergent and a germicidal bleach in the washing machine to make sure
the sickly woman doesn’t catch something from the water.
Having to go through all this to accomplish a simple task like laundry, having
to get water a little bottle at a time for drinking or cooking or tooth
brushing,
day after day, has become maddening.
“I used to watch those commercials where you send so much a month overseas
where the water’s not drinkable,” Haley said. “I never thought that it would
be here in Flint. And we’re here in the United States, yet we’re living like
we’re in a Third World country. It’s crazy.”
A moment of peace
Lisa sat in her wooden chair again, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee made
from bottled water, watching as her mother slept deeply. Most of Lisa’s days
are spent in that chair, except for the rare times when her mother is away.
Three times a week Big Mama goes for dialysis. Three times a week Lisa gets a
pail of warm water, brings it to her mother’s bedside, peels away her
bedclothes,
removes her diaper and washes her in sections before paramedics arrive and
carry the woman out the front door, down the crooked and crumbling concrete
steps, onto a gurney and into an ambulance.
And three times a week, she gets a few moments to herself.
It was Tuesday morning, an hour before they’d arrive, and Lisa was getting
ready to wake up her mother.
It’s not easy caring for Big Mama. She’s bipolar and very moody and yells at
Lisa. She’s developed dementia. And now she’s covered in unusual rashes that
nobody can explain, except that they first appeared around the time Flint
switched its water.
At 10 sharp the paramedics arrived. Four of them made their way into the house
and took up positions around the old woman.
“Ready to rock and roll?” one of them asked her.
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches from her porch as paramedicsBuy Photo
Lisa Gaines of Flint watches from her porch as paramedics carry her mother down
the steps to load her onto a gurney, then onto an ambulance, to take her
to dialysis on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
Big Mama didn’t reply. They hoisted her up, walked her out the door, down the
steps and into the ambulance.
Lisa watched from the doorway until her mom was safely in the ambulance. Then
she came back in and sat back in her chair, her home within her home.
“If I didn’t own this house I would take off,” she said. “What I’m hoping is
that my mother and brother can leave here. I do not want them dying in here
due to this water. But I think they will because they are so sick.”
She lit another cigarette, sipped her now-cold coffee, and leaned back for a
short rest before her mother came back home and needed constant attention again.
Big Mama’s lotions and medicines crowded the top of a nightstand next to the
hospital bed. Her washed blankets and clothes stood 2 feet high in the corner.
The dining room table shoved against the wall was covered in a stack of bills
and old newspapers and flyers from the city warning people not to drink the
tap water.
Among the bills in that pile was the one they just got for the water they say
made them sick.
John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be
found at
freep.com/carlisle.
Contact him: jcarlisle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Follow him on Twitter
@_johncarlisle.
Link to activate links:
http://www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/john-carlisle/2016/02/13/flint-family-poisoned-by-poverty-and-toxic-water/79423502/
