More than a thousand days after the water problems in Flint, Michigan, became national news, thousands of homes in the city still have lead pipes, from which the toxic metal can leach into the water supply. To remedy the problem, the lead pipes need to be replaced with safer, copper ones. That sounds straightforward, but it is a challenge to figure out which homes have lead pipes in the first place. The City’s records are incomplete and inaccurate. And digging up all the pipes would be costly and time-consuming.
That’s just the kind of problem that automation is supposed to help solve. So volunteer computer scientists, with some funding from Google,
designed a machine-learning model to help predict which homes were likely to have lead pipes. The artificial intelligence was supposed to help the City dig only where pipes were likely to need replacement. Through 2017, the plan was working. Workers inspected 8,833 homes, and of those, 6,228 homes had their pipes replaced—a 70 percent rate of accuracy. Heading into 2018, the City signed a big, national engineering firm,
AECOM, to a $5 million contract to “accelerate” the program, holding a buoyant community meeting to herald the arrival of the cavalry in Flint.
Few cities have embarked on a pipe-replacement program nearly as ambitious, let alone those that have to deal with the effects of
segregation,
environmental racism, and
the collapse of industry in the upper Midwest. In total, 18,786 families in Flint now know that their pipes are safe, because the City has either dug them up and confirmed that they’re copper or replaced them if they were made of lead or galvanized steel. “I think things have gone extremely well,” Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told me. “We’re a year ahead of schedule and under budget.”
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AECOM’s team, however, struggled before it even started. In late October 2018, the project manager, Alan Wong, told me that the problems started during the transition between McDaniel’s team and AECOM. Wong’s crew was supposed to begin work in October 2017, when McDaniel’s contract ended. But AECOM’s deal was not actually signed until December 28, 2017. There was no overlap between the teams. “We would have had October, November, and all of December,” Wong told me. “We would have been able to mesh, to have a reasonable transition. It didn’t work out.”
Furthermore, AECOM does not appear to have considered the predictive model central to the project. According to a court declaration, after seemingly positive initial discussions, Schwartz, from the University of Michigan, sent five emails to Wong from January through May 2018, none of which was answered. Wong told me that all his company had was a “heat map” of the city—like an image—but Schwartz said his own team had offered its database, which consisted of individual lead-probability scores for every single address in the city.
AECOM basically approached the problem new, as if other people had not been successfully hammering away at it since June 2016. It discovered, as others had before, that the data the City possessed were neither wholly digitized nor wholly accurate. Wong says the company doing the digitization work pro bono, Captricity, was supposed to be done in January but did not finish until May.
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Looking at this data, the State, which reimburses contractors for their work, has said it is
going to suspend payments to the City because of how the program has been managed. “The City made a policy decision to stop prioritizing excavations at homes where lead or galvanized steel service lines were expected to be found,” the Department of the Attorney General alleged. Now, the City, the NRDC, the State, and AECOM are
negotiating to return to the machine-learning model that was used in 2017. AECOM’s contract has been renewed, and appears to include a return to the model. An
additional $1.1 million has been allocated to the firm for future work.
City officials have made a good-faith attempt at implementing an ambitious, difficult program. Weaver made important decisions that she saw as protecting the health and safety of all her city’s residents. AECOM claims it has done the best it could. But good faith notwithstanding, a heartbreaking fact can’t be ignored: Simply continuing the 2017 program’s method might have pulled nearly all the remaining lead out of the city during 2018. Instead, thousands of people got the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have copper lines. But others who are more likely to have lead lines that could leach poison into their drinking water will have to wait for digging to commence again to learn for sure.
And that’s assuming that the battle between the City and the State about reimbursements doesn’t get settled in the State’s favor, depriving residents of the support necessary to complete the pipe-replacement project. This tragedy already has more acts than anyone wants to recount, and the stage is now set for yet another one to begin.
