Flint, the Vehicle City, birthplace of the General Motor Company and the United Auto Workers, a vanishing city propelled to the spotlight by one of the largest municipal public health crises in the 21st Century, the Flint Water Crisis
This map from National Geographic was published with the article: “Five years on, the Flint Water Crisis is nowhere near over.” Much of the water testing in Flint showed elevated lead levels remained high into 2015. The downtown band with Wards 5, 6, and 7 showed the highest levels.
This historical gem from the Library of Congress comes from the “Atlas of Genesee County, Michigan” shows the City of Flint as a much smaller entity than present day with remnants of the Smith’s Indian Reservation that eventually became part of Flint proper. I was surprised to see that Michigan School for the Deaf has held their land as far back as this, but then checked that the school was founded in 1848 and opened in 1854.
This site began idea began from my engagement with MSU researchers after the Flint Water Crisis where we focused on mapping food resources that help mitigate lead in the body (high calcium and high vitamin C foods).
More recently I started noticing that many Flint mapping efforts from the Flint Water Crisis time period were disappearing, breaking, or have been removed altogether.
One such map was this one from PBS that they mapped on a now assumedly defunct Carto account and the link provided to the State of Michigan’s datasets returns an Error 404 showing the page no longer exists. From the article:
“We mapped the results of these lead tests for the month of January. These are tests of people’s drinking water more than two months after the city switched back to Lake Huron water from Detroit. We could confirm the addresses of 4,051 drinking water tests in Flint for the month of January. We grouped the lead results into six ranges.
- 0 ppb: no lead detected in the drinking water
- 1-4 ppb: the EPA deems this range as acceptable
- 5-14 ppb: exposure is a concern, but still below an EPA “federal action level”
- 15-49 ppb: a range above the federal action level for lead, but can be treated by filters
- 50-149 ppb: reaching dangerous levels, but can be treated by filters
- 150 and above: a range at which the federal government says water filters might not work”
Archival map work is critical in the digital age where many of these project can disappear in a moment with no physical backup, no archived datasets, and unfortunately all that is left is a random digital image.
Mapping Flint 