Dear Reader,

A city where the majority of residents are Black. A city that has a history of poverty and fiscal problems. A city that had a state-appointed emergency manager. A city with lead in the drinking water. Photos of people lined up in their cars for bottled water distribution.

If you’ve been reading our coverage lately, you know I’m not talking about Flint.

This time, it’s a public health crisis in Benton Harbor. A city on the other side of the state, and roughly 10 times smaller than Flint. As in the Flint Water Crisis, the Benton Harbor story includes legacy infrastructure issues, bureaucratic mismanagement, and political finger-pointing.

But there’s also one inescapable shared theme:

“The thing that really rings true is, and you’ve heard it over and over and over again: This wouldn't have been allowed to happen in a community that had wealth,” said Ron Fonger, who has covered the Flint Water Crisis since it began for MLive. “In addition to being poor cities, they're cities that are either majority or near-majority Black residents.”

The discouraging similarities suggest some lessons have not been learned – lessons about proactively addressing corrosion control in cities with lead water service lines to homes, lessons about collaboration between state and local officials, lessons about communicating effectively to city residents.

When Fonger was doing follow-up coverage in the past few years on cities other than Flint facing elevating levels of lead in the water, he noted not just similar demographics in the affected cities. He noticed a similar refrain from public officials: “It seemed like the response from the state and even the people who were running those water systems was ‘Oh, yeah. You know, we're working on it.’ There didn't seem to be any big sense of urgency.”

But MLive did learn something from the Flint water saga: These are not one-off crises. There is a larger story about environmental problems disproportionately affecting poor and/or minority communities, and we’re going to continue to cover the causes and consequences of that.

“In the end, contamination and the impacts of that stuff tend to fall disproportionately on Black or brown people,” said Garret Ellison, an MLive environment reporter who is leading our coverage in Benton Harbor. “It’s just a fact; there's plenty of data out there to support it.”

MLive explored the larger pattern earlier this year in two excellent documentaries. The first, “The Fight for Environmental Justice in Michigan,” focuses on the most polluted ZIP code in Michigan – a neighborhood in downriver Detroit that is boxed in by heavy industry and highways. The second video report showed how one neighborhood in Kalamazoo that surrounds a paper manufacturing plant has asthma rates five times higher than surrounding communities.

Air quality, water quality. Flint, Benton Harbor, Detroit. And the inconvenient truth of who is being impacted the most.

“You can take the picture from Benton Harbor, of Black people getting bottled water put into the trunk of their car. You can strip the caption off it and that could be Flint, it could be Newark, it could be Chicago,” Ellison said.

“There are lots of cities with these demographics in this issue. It’s not just a water problem, it's an emissions issue. And it’s becoming impossible to ignore, here in Michigan and I think Washington, too.”

In Lansing, it appears that the focus right now is on affixing blame and posturing for next year’s gubernatorial race. Republicans are holding oversight hearings to investigate how Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her agencies are handling the Benton Harbor crisis, and the GOP is already running TV ads criticizing the state’s response.

On the ground in Benton Harbor, people have more practical and urgent concerns. MLive is telling those stories, and we’ll continue to do so from Michigan’s many inner cities facing health concerns, environmental discrimination and other hardships.

###

🎧 On this week’s episode of the MLive podcast Behind the Headlines, Garret Ellison and Ron Fonger talk about the public health, political and social ramifications of the water crisis in Benton Harbor, and where the situation stands with the Flint Water Crisis. Listen here.

###

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.