Health and Disability

In Flint, Michigan, citizens were subjected to extremely high levels of lead in their water source for several years. The water crisis was exacerbated by the lack of response from Michigan’s Emergency Managers, state-appointed officials who take power from local elected officials in order to return cities to financial solvency.

The graph below shows Google trends from the search term “lead water” within the city’s geographic region when compared to the State of Michigan, and the United States as a whole.

It shows that residents started searching for ‘lead water’ almost as soon as the City of Flint switched its water source. Further, we can see that residents continued to search for lead water long before any elected official or emergency manager seemed to realize there was an issue. Interestingly, one of the major peaks, in March of 2015, is when the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) revealed their results from the first round of lead testing, which indicated that lead levels were extremely low. One would expect this to appease the city residents, and perhaps lead to a drop in Google searches for lead water; however, we can see that is clearly not the case.