GM Plant Stops Using Flint Water After It Corrodes Car Parts—But Residents Must Keep Drinking It

General Motors’ engine plant in Flint stops using city water after discovering it is corroding engine parts, switching to Lake Huron water from a neighboring township at an anticipated cost to the city of $400,000. GM reports that the super-high levels of chloride in Flint River water are causing corrosion when they come in contact with metal components. “The water was rusting the [engine] blocks,” says Dan Reyes, president of UAW Local 599, which represents the plant’s nearly 900 workers.

This development exposes the brutal calculus of environmental racism and class inequality: water that corrodes metal car parts is deemed unacceptable for manufacturing, triggering immediate protective action for corporate interests—but the same water continues to be forced on 100,000 Flint residents, including thousands of children. The message is unmistakable: engine blocks are more valuable than Black children’s brains.

GM’s switch occurs just six months after the city began using Flint River water, yet city and state officials continue to insist for another year that the water is safe for human consumption. While the corporation can negotiate an alternative water supply to protect its manufacturing operations, Flint residents—57% Black, over 40% living in poverty—have no such power under the anti-democratic emergency manager system. Their democratically elected officials have been stripped of authority, leaving them with no recourse as their children are poisoned.

The incident reveals what corporations knew and when: If the water was corrosive enough to damage industrial equipment in October 2014, officials should have immediately recognized the danger to aging residential pipes and the lead poisoning risk to human beings. Instead, residents would be forced to drink the toxic water for another full year before the switch back to Detroit water in October 2015—a year in which thousands of children suffered irreversible neurological damage from lead exposure.