>> Multiple people got sick
and multiple people died. >> The doctor asked, he said,
"Have you heard of Legionnaire?" >> NARRATOR: A "Frontline"
exclusive investigation. >> I plotted out each one of
those deaths, just to see if anything
stood out. And, in fact, it did. >> NARRATOR: What did Michigan
officials know? >> A lot of people didn't want
us to expose what was happening and
why it was happening. >> NARRATOR: And was there
a cover-up? >> Test the water. They should have tested
the water. >> NARRATOR:
Tonight on "Frontline"-- "Flint's Deadly Water." ♪ ♪ >> There is nothing more
valuable than water. And Michigan is blessed to be
surrounded by more fresh water than anywhere else on the
planet. >> They're calling it the dawn
of a new era, miles of pipeline transporting
fresh water to three counties and two cities,
but officials say... >> NARRATOR: The idea was to
turn all that water into money. >> A new pipeline could bring
economic opportunity, could create regional
cooperation, and it could be, you know, an
affordable, healthy source of, of water for our city,
long-term. >> NARRATOR: The proposed
pipeline was supposed to carry low-cost, high-quality water
from Lake Huron to businesses and homes throughout eastern
Michigan, including the city of Flint. >> The $274 million project
should be completed in early 2016. >> And it was a way for this
community to take advantage of the natural resources
that it's surrounded by, and that could give, you know,
our region a competitive advantage. >> NARRATOR: Instead, the
pipeline set in motion a series of events that led
to an unprecedented public-health crisis in Flint. >> It's not safe to drink the
water in Flint, Michigan. >> NARRATOR: The exposure of
thousands of children to lead-tainted water would
become a national outrage. >> ...water has been poisoned
with lead for months. >> I think about this every
single day, and I still try to figure out
what I could have seen or done or asked, you know,
differently. >> Nearly a thousand homes still
have dangerous levels of lead in the water... >> But I just didn't ever
imagine that there would be a failure
at every level of government with something as basic
as the safety of drinking water. >> NARRATOR: And overshadowed by
the lead poisoning was another problem
with the water. >> Most people outside of Flint
look at the lead issue as the main issue. But the killer has been
Legionnaires', and people don't know that. >> Two more deaths have been
linked to the Legionnaires' disease
outbreak. >> That was the one that I think
they tried to hide the most. That's the one I still don't
think that they want people outside
of Flint to know. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: In Flint, they
still line up for bottled water. >> Oh, my gosh. Are you serious? >> NARRATOR: Jacqui McBride
started coming here after her daughter got sick with
Legionnaires' disease, a severe and potentially deadly
form of pneumonia. >> I don't want the same thing
to happen to me. I refuse to drink
from the faucet. Ooh, Jay, you should have been
here a long time ago. >> Come on up, come on up. >> Hey there. >> NARRATOR: The Legionnaires'
outbreak hasn't received much attention outside of Flint, despite being one of the largest
in U.S. history. But "Frontline" has been
investigating the outbreak and how state and local
officials failed to stop it. For the past two years, producers Abby Ellis
and Kayla Ruble have been reporting in Flint. >> One, two, three cases of
Legionnaires'. >> And they're a couple of
blocks from each other. >> NARRATOR: With their
colleague, reporter Jacob Carah,
the team reviewed thousands of pages
of health records and government documents; spent months following
the legal effort to hold people accountable;
and interviewed local officials, residents, infectious-disease
specialists, and others to trace the story
of the deadly outbreak, which began more than a year
before the world even knew there was a water crisis
in Flint. ♪ ♪ The outbreak started
in June 2014, when the first known patient
showed up at a local hospital. He was 54 years old, suffering from what appeared
to be pneumonia. >> So, for that particular
patient, going to the hospital as soon as
they had, you know, high fever, cough, diarrhea, you know, they know that
something's really wrong. They order a special diagnostic
test, which isn't routinely done, and then they know it's
Legionnaires' disease, and it's now sort of a race
against time to save that patient. >> NARRATOR: Janet Stout is one
of the nation's foremost Legionnaires' specialists and
advised officials in Flint on how to respond
to the disease, which is caused by inhaling
water droplets contaminated with bacteria. >> What's distinctive about
Legionnaires' disease is its severity. Almost all cases are admitted
to the intensive-care unit. The other thing that's unique
about Legionella, Legionella bacteria,
is that it's in water. So, if you can control
the organism in water, you can completely prevent
the disease. >> NARRATOR: Three days later, another man was diagnosed
with Legionnaires' at a hospital in Flint. In the week that followed,
three more cases at three different hospitals
were reported to the state and county health
departments. >> Because it's a reportable
disease going to one centralized
location, which is state and county
reporting, the people receiving... at the
health department receiving this are going, "I've not seen
five cases in four weeks, ever." So now you start to see
a pattern. This is not normal. >> NARRATOR: By midsummer, more
than a dozen Legionnaires' cases had been confirmed, as many as
Genesee County would typically see in a year. But most people in Flint knew
nothing about the growing outbreak,
including Jacqui McBride, whose daughter Jassmine was
its youngest known victim. >> I walked into that room,
all I see is this machine, these tubes, my daughter laying
there stiff, you know, just stiff. The doctor asked, he said,
"Have you heard of Legionnaire?" And I'm, like, "No.
What the hell is that?" >> NARRATOR: Jassmine was 26
and had diabetes, which made her vulnerable. She was admitted to the
intensive-care unit. >> The first doctor kept saying,
"Well, we don't know if she's going to make it
or not." I didn't want to hear that. ♪ ♪ I think the same day she was
there, somebody had passed, maybe next to her,
and had the same thing she had, Legionnaires'. >> NARRATOR:
Scientists we've spoken to who have examined the
Legionnaires' outbreak point to a fateful decision,
months before Jassmine got sick, to switch Flint's water
to a new source. >> The first dirt turn for the
pipeline, ladies and gentlemen! >> Crews break ground on the
Karegnondi Water Pipeline. >> ...74 miles of large-diameter
pipeline will stretch... >> NARRATOR:
For decades, Flint-- one of the poorest cities
in America-- had bought its water
from Detroit. >> ...pipeline is expected
to cost about $230 million. >> NARRATOR: Water from the
proposed pipeline was supposed to be cheaper. >> Thank you, Mr. Councilman,
and the rest of the council... >> NARRATOR: A point the
county's top water official stressed when he came to Flint. >> Once it's completed, there
will be several-million-dollar cost reduction to all of
the communities involved... I saw a great opportunity for
this poor community to save money. They would have a savings of
two million their first year from what they were spending
just to purchase water. >> Keep it on file so that
we can begin the committee... >> NARRATOR: Flint's city
council eventually backed the plan, but officially, they
had little say, because, at the time, the nearly
bankrupt city's finances were controlled by the state, which went ahead and approved
the pipeline. >> And so we didn't have control
of the water, the decisions-- nothing. >> NARRATOR: To help finance it
all, Flint's state-appointed managers
had another plan. >> It has been five decades
since Flint used the river
for drinking water. Today, they opened up the gates
to start that process again. >> NARRATOR: Instead of staying
on the Detroit water supply while the pipeline
was being built, the city would temporarily get
its water from the Flint River. >> ...until a new water pipeline
is finished from Lake Huron. >> NARRATOR: That decision-- without a vote from the city
council-- would force the city to activate
an old water-treatment plant that had barely been used
in half a century. >> I certainly still expected
that the same safeguards would be in place no matter what
the drinking water source was. >> NARRATOR:
But inside the plant, we've learned that a foreman
named Matt McFarland was having concerns. >> He said, "We're not ready." He said the plant wasn't ready. The funding just wasn't there. The staffing wasn't there. There was a lot that would need
to be done, and it would take time. >> NARRATOR: McFarland died
in 2016, but while working at the water
plant, he regularly confided in his
sister Tonja Petrella. This is the first time she's
spoken publicly about her brother's concerns. >> He would call me, and he
would just be so upset, and he would leave me messages
that were just frantic, like, "Tonja, you have to call me
right away. Please call me right away." I mean, he knew that they
weren't ready for this. >> NARRATOR: As the deadline
approached, McFarland expressed his concerns
to his supervisors. One of them, Mike Glasgow,
had concerns, too. He wouldn't speak to us,
but in an email, he told state regulators
that if the plant were to open on schedule, "it will be against
my direction." He later told investigators
he never received a response. >> The city right now is just
testing and treating this water. They're not using it in the
drinking water yet. They hope to start doing that
in the next few days. >> NARRATOR: With the opening of
the plant just hours away, Petrella began texting friends--
at her brother's behest-- that the water wasn't safe. >> I remember specifically the
day before they actually flipped the switch, he called me,
and he said, "Tonja, contact everyone that
you know in Flint, anybody you care about,
and tell them, 'Do not drink the water.'" >> This is our moment:
three, two, one. >> He said, "It's not safe. We're not ready," he said,
"and people are going to die." >> Here's to Flint!
>> Here's to Flint! >> Hear, hear. >> NARRATOR: Within weeks, the
problems McFarland had been worried about began to appear. >> Flint is now getting its
water from the Flint River. It's not sitting well with some
residents and businesses... >> And this is what is coming
out of the tap. >> Water's brown,
has a bad odor... >> I was covering Flint
City Hall at the time. It was a regular sight, like,
every week, someone was bringing in a bottle
of water that was discolored. >> People were telling me as a
councilperson that they was breaking out
with rashes. >> We cannot drink the water,
we can't cook with the water, let alone brush our teeth. >> That was real quick after
the switch, some of those signs. >> The city says residents won't
notice a change in quality. >> The message we keep getting
back over and over and over again is, "It's really
not anything to worry about." >> Flint city officials say
drinking water from the Flint River is now safe
to drink for the entire city... >> It was, "Not a problem,
not a problem, not a problem." >> NARRATOR: But what most of
Flint didn't know at the time was that the state hadn't
required the plant to protect the city's water pipes
from corrosion. They soon became a breeding
ground for Legionella, and people were getting sick. Throughout the summer of 2014, cases of Legionnaires' disease
kept appearing, reaching over 30 by the fall. >> By October of 2014,
there would have been enough information to really understand
that there was a significant problem in Flint. That would be considered
a large outbreak, and that would be
an investigation that we'd want to do right away. >> NARRATOR: The county health
department had started looking into the problem. And in emails, state officials
were already speculating that Flint's new water supply
may be to blame and worrying that word
might get out. >> Everybody that knows anything
about Legionnaires' disease knows it's in the water. So you go and test the water. And then you disinfect
the water. That's what's been done
virtually everywhere else, except in Flint. >> NARRATOR: No one from the
state health department would be interviewed on camera. But a spokeswoman told us the
outbreak could not be definitively connected to the
water because, she acknowledged, the water was never tested. By the end of 2014,
there were 40 confirmed cases of Legionnaires',
and three people had died. Jassmine McBride had been lucky. After three months
in the hospital, she was able to go home. >> When I got out, I had to learn how to walk,
talk, eat. I mean, it was just like being
reborn all over again. >> The oxygen, you're on that
all the time, or do you ever get to take
it...? >> Sometimes I take it off just
to see myself, but I'm on it all the time.
>> Yeah. >> NARRATOR: Her battle with
Legionnaires' left her heart and lungs
weakened. Her kidneys were severely
damaged. When we met her in 2018,
she needed a transplant, but wasn't healthy enough to be
eligible for one. >> You just had dialysis just
now, right? Your lungs are clear. They've cleared out the fluid. >> NARRATOR: Her doctor,
Marcus Zervos, had been treating a chronic skin infection that
her weakened immune system couldn't control. >> My goal with you is to try to
get those wounds healed up so that you can get your
transplant. >> Mm-hmm. >> What we're doing with this is
tissue grafting. I'm really happy with them. They are doing a lot better. >> I'm ecstatic. >> You know, if I can get them healed over a little bit more, I'm going to get you an
appointment with those transplant doctors. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: While Jassmine was
recovering back in early 2015, the head of Michigan's health
department, Nick Lyon, met with one of
his epidemiologists and was shown this graph
of the Legionnaires' outbreak. The epidemiologist noted that it
coincided with the switch
of the water supply. Lyon asked to be kept informed. >> Neighbors in Flint joined
together today to rally against the city's
treatment... >> NARRATOR: Residents were
still unaware of the outbreak. >> City officials say the water
is safe and there's no need to worry. >> NARRATOR:
But at the suggestion of the state health department, county officials drafted an
alert to medical providers. It was never sent,
according to internal emails, because the person in charge
wasn't there that day. Instead, just 15 people
were notified by email. No one in the county or state
health departments would explain why the alert never went out. >> It's totally unacceptable. There was no notification sent
to the medical society. So that... (chuckles) I'm trying not to be profane,
but that's utter rubbish. >> NARRATOR: Around the same
time, county health officials trying
to confirm if the water was the source of
the outbreak reached out to Dr. Stout. >> And I said, "Call the Center
for Disease Control and Prevention. They will come, they will do the
testing that needs to be done." And I thought... "Done." >> NARRATOR: Emails show the
county health department wrote to the CDC right away, saying they were now up to 47
cases of Legionnaires' disease and needed help. But state health officials had
a very different response. They told the CDC they didn't
need its help. If they did,
they'd get in touch. The CDC persisted, saying they
felt a sense of urgency. It was one of the largest
outbreaks in years, they said, and they recommended
a full investigation. >> Looking through the emails
and starting to see how things were evolving, that kind
of resource on the ground-- boots on the ground,
particularly helping the Genesee County Health
Department, which was understaffed
at the time-- would have been a game changer
for the Legionella outbreak. >> NARRATOR: But the call
to the CDC never came, even as more top officials
became aware of the problem. Though Governor Rick Snyder
would insist he didn't know about the
outbreak until 2016, emails show that by March 2015,
at least three of his aides-- and two of his cabinet members--
had been told about it. And into the summer,
it continued. Three cases in May,
seven more in June, 13 in July, 13 in August. >> Tick, tick, tick,
case after case after case. There's another one, there's
another one, there's another one. >> NARRATOR: There'd been
90 confirmed cases in the year and a half following
the water switch. 12 people had died. >> It is a very big epidemic, one of the largest epidemics
of Legionnaires' disease that we know of. >> We heard rumors that there
were outbreaks of Legionella that we could not confirm, and we weren't getting any
communication from our county health
department, definitely no information
from the state department. They were strangely silent. >> Developing now, a
public-health emergency... >> People in Flint being told
not to drink... >> NARRATOR: But once high lead
levels in the water system became public in late 2015,
state officials had to confront the fact that the water switch
was having grave consequences. >> ...levels of lead in kids'
blood has risen... >> I think that really
was a pivotal point, where people paid attention
to a community that just used common sense and knew water shouldn't be
brown and rusty-looking. >> State officials say their
testing shows lead in the water. >> NARRATOR: With the crisis
building, the governor ordered the city
to stop using the Flint River and return to Detroit water. Within months, Snyder and his
top officials would address the Legionnaires' outbreak. An aide to the governor called an environmental engineering
professor at Wayne State University. >> He said that the governor was
about to go onstage to announce a Legionnaires'
disease outbreak, and he wanted to know whether or
not I could determine if the change in the water
supply was the cause of the Legionnaires' disease. And I basically told him that
I thought I could pull together a team to look at this, but that I would have to make
some calls. And he said, "No, no, no. "The governor is going on in,
like, 15 minutes. I need an answer in 15 minutes." ♪ ♪ >> Well, thank you for coming
today. I'm going to share information
that has been shared with the health-care community
in the past, but hasn't really been put out
to the public. Over the course of 2014
and 2015, we saw a spike
in Legionnaires' disease. I believe the numbers for the
preceding years, before 2014, we had six cases, 11 cases,
13 cases, and eight cases. In 2014, we had 45 cases. And then in 2015,
there were 42 cases. >> I'd been writing about Flint
water for more than a year, and I never heard anything about
Legionnaires' disease until the governor went on TV
that day. >> Thank you. >> NARRATOR: The Republican
governor was joined by the state's top health
officials: Nick Lyon and the chief medical
executive, Dr. Eden Wells. >> Most of the time, what it's
going to manifest is as a pneumonia. This pneumonia would not... >> They say, "We can't conclude
that the water was the source of Legionnaires'
disease in this outbreak." >> MDHHS cannot conclude that
this increase is related to the water switch, due to
the lack of clinical isolates during the time period and because not all of the cases
had exposure to the City of Flint water. >> Well, let's ask the question, "What would be necessary in
order to make that link?" They should have tested
the water. >> This is part of our efforts
to be transparent and share information
as quickly as possible as we can with the public... >> NARRATOR: At the press
conference, no one mentioned that the CDC
had urged a full investigation eight months earlier. >> This is certainly
a bombshell, a game changer... >> There was an outbreak of
Legionnaires' disease that quite frankly none of us
knew about... >> ...just shocking, because we
found out about a totally different
disease and deaths. >> NARRATOR: Within weeks, Michigan's Republican attorney
general announced he was appointing
a special counsel to lead a criminal investigation
into the water crisis. >> I'm announcing today
that Todd Flood, a tough former Wayne County
prosecutor, will be joining me and working
with me in an investigation to determine
what Michigan laws, if any, may have been broken
in the Flint water crisis. >> People got sick, terribly so,
and the water was contaminated. And the public was in an outcry. I have never seen a case like
this in the history of the United States before. There needs to be an answer
where people understand and can hold accountable those,
if any, who are at fault. We didn't know if there was
criminality or not. It's always about who knew what
and when, and what did they do about it? You take your evidence,
and you follow that evidence down the path. >> NARRATOR: As the criminal
investigation was getting underway, the
scientific investigation into the Legionnaires' outbreak
was also getting organized. >> We started meeting
with the state regularly. And when we first started
meeting with them, they were very collegial,
and it was pretty much, "We will open the keys to
anything if it can help
understand this." >> NARRATOR: Shawn McElmurry
had pulled together a team of 23 scientists and experts
from around the state. >> We were all focused on making
sure that we didn't have
another outbreak, another season outbreak. And so there was a lot of
pressure to get this done by the time summer started. >> NARRATOR: But as the months
went by, the team says the state
wouldn't authorize them to start the search
for the source of the outbreak. Dr. Zervos was the
infectious-disease expert, and he was worried about
the delay. >> It was critical to start
right away, because by June, we expected to see more cases
of Legionnaires' disease, and there would be more deaths, which is what we expressed
in a meeting that included top leadership
at MDHHS. >> NARRATOR: The scientists say
they met with Nick Lyon to urge him to step up
surveillance for Legionnaires' cases. >> I remember my colleague
telling him that if he didn't do that,
you know, people could die. Unfortunately, Nick Lyon's
response was that, "Well, they have to die
of something." >> I, I was, you know,
I was flabbergasted, and I didn't say anything
right then. Although it was a situation
where you're just, I mean, you're just in shock as
a result of him saying that, the director of the health
department. >> NARRATOR: Nick Lyon declined
to be interviewed. In a letter, his attorney said, "Director Lyon did not make
that crass remark." He said the team's work was one
of Lyon's top priorities and blamed any delays
on the scientists. ♪ ♪ Special Prosecutor Todd Flood
was also clashing with state officials,
as his investigation began turning up evidence of
misconduct and negligence and an effort within the
government to cover up the water crisis. >> Every single witness
had a paid-for attorney by the government. Whether or not you were a
suspect or a defendant or a witness, every single one had a government-paid-for
attorney. So we were going up against
Goliath. A lot of people didn't want us
to expose what was happening
and why it was happening. >> Breaking news right now from
Flint, Michigan, we've been following this all
day long. The state's attorney general... >> NARRATOR: By the end of July
2016, Flood had charged nine state
and local officials with crimes related to the lead
and Legionnaires' crises, including conspiracy,
misconduct, neglect of duty, and tampering with evidence. >> Today three men face the very
first criminal charges in connection with the Flint
water crisis. >> We were starting very low
and we worked out plea deals with most of them to cooperate
and move up the chain. >> NARRATOR: As the criminal
investigation continued, behind the scenes, the team of
scientists who were supposed to be investigating the outbreak was running up against
resistance. >> As we kept meeting
with state officials, there was increasing pushback
about the extent of data we would have access to,
and more constraints being, in our view, put on the
scientific investigation. >> We're not allowed, for
example, to talk to patients that had Legionnaires' disease. We were not allowed to go into
the homes of patients that had Legionnaires' disease, which was really a, a very big,
very serious limitation. >> NARRATOR: They clashed with
Dr. Eden Wells over testing residents' water filters
for evidence of bacteria. >> This turned out to be a
really contentious issue with the state. They didn't want me to collect
those filters because they thought it might
just cause more... um.... might scare people more
than it would provide valuable information. >> At one point, I felt
personally that it might even be impossible
to be able to objectively do the project. >> NARRATOR: They also felt it
was critical to examine pneumonia deaths
during the water crisis, in case any had been
misdiagnosed. >> So there are some cases
of Legionnaires' disease that are not necessarily
diagnosed as Legionnaires' disease, but
just diagnosed as pneumonia. >> Okay, so did you guys look
into pneumonia deaths? >> Ultimately, that was one
thing that we weren't allowed
access to. It was deemed as beyond the
scope of what they wanted us
to look into. But as time went on, I, I came
to realize that maybe their interest in
understanding things wasn't the same as my interest
in understanding things, and that there were potential
liabilities to the state and to the people
I was talking with. >> NARRATOR: Dr. Wells declined
to comment. Nick Lyon's attorney denied the
health department had blocked the scientists' requests and
told us Lyon was simply trying to ensure the state was
"funding necessary and appropriate research." With the scientists and state
at odds, "Frontline" was doing the
pneumonia research that McElmurry and his
colleagues were seeking. >> I kind of tasked myself to
kind of just start looking through the electronic death
records system at the clerk's office, because the only place to start, the only evidence you can find,
is pneumonia deaths. So I started looking in the
timeframe of the switch to the Flint River. >> I recognize you.
You've been here before, right? >> Yeah. >> Cool, thank you,
you're all set. >> NARRATOR: Over several
months, "Frontline" reporters analyzed
every death record in the county during
a seven-year period, looking for people whose cause
of death had been listed as pneumonia. >> You have to go through every
single death certificate one by one. Because there was really no
other way to do it. You can't go digging up bodies, and, you know, doing antigen
tests on bones. I started just going through
just the timeframe of the switch, and I started
counting the pneumonia deaths that I found. I thought I was crazy
when I was looking at it, because I kept finding more,
not less. >> NARRATOR: The state had put
the death toll from the Legionnaires' outbreak
that ran from 2014 to 2015 at 12 people. But "Frontline" found dozens who
were said to have died of pneumonia in the same period. >> There was this spike during
the switch. It was almost three times more
than prior years. >> NARRATOR: As McElmurry and
his team feared, there were signs
the outbreak's toll could be higher
than anyone knew. >> Why wasn't a thorough
investigation launched from the state? I mean, this raises some very
critical questions, if you knew at the time that
people were dying. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: We would spend many
months in Flint trying to find the true extent
of the Legionnaires' outbreak. But by late 2016, McElmurry and
the other scientists had begun testing the water
and getting results back. >> It didn't take us too long to
start finding Legionella in some of the water entering
people's homes. >> NARRATOR: Believing they
should share their findings with the public, the scientists held a meeting
at a local library and said they'd found Legionella
and other bacteria in people's water filters. The next day, Shawn McElmurry
heard from Rich Baird, a top aide to Governor Snyder. >> I was under no illusion that
every time I talked to Rich Baird, it was as if I
was talking to the governor, and he said, well, he wasn't
upset at my guy, "but he wasn't on message." You know, he needed to be on
message. He needed to "lead with public
health," whatever that meant, and basically said that,
you know, he didn't want to take away
funding from the university if I wasn't able to get
on message. I viewed that as just a threat
to me and my team about the work we were doing, that we needed to better align
our results with what their position was. >> And what did you understand
that position to be? >> That there were no more
problems with the water in Flint at that time. >> NARRATOR: In an email, Baird
told us that he never tried to influence
or pressure the team "to do anything except abide
by the terms and conditions of their contract." And that they failed to stay
within the scope and parameters of the project. >> Just up today on the criminal
investigation into the Flint water crisis. >> NARRATOR: By 2017, the
allegations of misconduct had reached inside
the governor's cabinet. >> ...in a startling revelation,
in-court documents from the state attorney
general... >> NARRATOR: Nick Lyon and Eden
Wells were now facing involuntary manslaughter charges for failing to alert the public and covering up the
Legionnaires' outbreak. >> The department's chief
medical executive, Dr. Eden Wells, accused of
threatening to stop funding... >> The allegations are health
director Nick Lyon knew more than a year before this
announcement. >> Nick Lyon is presumed
innocent, but it was plain as day that the Department of Health
and Human Services' state epidemiologist,
along with others, had talked to the director about
the Legionella outbreak. We're saying he had a duty to
tell the people. He failed to do that duty. He then kept things under wrap. The spike was continuing to go
up, and sure enough, in the summer of 2015, multiple
people got sick and multiple people died. >> These charges all center
around the deadly Legionnaires'
disease outbreak. >> NARRATOR: Prosecutors also
accused Lyon and Wells of interfering with Shawn
McElmurry's investigation. McElmurry and other scientists
were subpoenaed to testify about it
during pre-trial hearings. >> The crux of their testimony
came down to, "We were stopped or prevented
because they didn't want "to know the truth--
the government, "they didn't want us
to find Legionella. "They didn't want us
to find bacteria. "They didn't want us
to test samples. They didn't want us to collect
from filters in homes." Why? Why? Because they didn't want them
to show that the water was the actual
source of the Legionella. >> NARRATOR: Throughout, the
state health department insisted that the biggest source of the
Legionnaires' outbreak was not the city's water, but
Flint's McLaren Hospital, which it said was linked
to nearly 60% of the cases. >> First of all, not every case
of Legionnaires' disease came out of McLaren. And second of all,
if the state believed that there was a Legionnaires'
outbreak in McLaren Hospital, the state had every duty to do
something about it and inform people about it. That's not what the state did. >> NARRATOR: McLaren officials
declined to be interviewed, citing ongoing lawsuits by
Legionnaires' victims, but pointed out that the
hospital gets its water from the city. They hired Dr. Stout
to provide testimony, and to help them test for and
prevent Legionella. >> Somewhere around 30% or so
of cases had absolutely no healthcare
association. That means they were never,
not only at McLaren, but never at any of the other
hospitals, either. So the argument that the problem
is the hospital doesn't hold weight. >> NARRATOR: Shawn McElmurry and
his team came to the same conclusion, and in early 2018, published
their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. >> The outbreak is associated with the change
in the water supply. When they switched
to the Flint River, they didn't properly treat
the water. And as it went through
the distribution system, they also had reactions
and things that... with corroding pipes. And so there are pockets
of the city where you had high amounts of iron, low
chlorine, high organic matter. And in those places, it is very likely that they had
biological growth. So there's all sorts of
indicators that there was massive
water-quality problems throughout the time in which
they were on the Flint River. >> NARRATOR: The state health
department publicly rejected the paper, saying in a statement the scientists had "only added
to the public confusion," and that an outside consulting
firm the state hired was critical of their work. Nick Lyon's attorney went even
further in a letter to "Frontline," questioning
the credibility and expertise of the team. The state eventually released
its own report insisting there was
"only one common source" for most of the cases--
McLaren Hospital. ♪ ♪ As for Jassmine McBride,
by the summer of 2018, just shy of her 30th birthday, she was still suffering
from the effects of the Legionnaires' disease. >> 28th.
>> 28th of...? >> July.
Celebrating my 30th birthday, seeing that I was supposed to be
gone in 2014 due to the Legionnaire, so...
>> Mm-hmm, okay. >> And I just want to be around
family and friends. >> That's good.
Mm-hmm. We're just here
for some paperwork? >> Well, yeah, but when I leave
here, I'm going to the hospital. >> Okay. >> (weakly): I'm having, um... some trouble breathing. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: She was on
24-hour-a-day oxygen, suffering frequent
respiratory failure. >> I'm about to just pass out. >> Do you need something? >> (breathing shallowly) This is what I go through when I'm having trouble
breathing. It's like I can't--
I can barely talk, I can barely function. I can barely walk. (knock at door) (door opens) It's a scary feeling. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: On this day, she
was taken to the hospital for emergency dialysis. But because of her condition, she was no closer to getting on
the kidney transplant list. >> This feels so... (sighs) This is not where I wanted
to be. ♪ ♪ >> Nick Lyon faces involuntary
manslaughter charges in connection with the death
of two men in the Flint Legionnaires'
outbreak. >> NARRATOR: That summer,
11 months of pre-trial testimony was coming to an end in the case
against Nick Lyon... >> Did Lyon fail to warn about
the outbreak? >> NARRATOR: ...with a
long-awaited ruling on whether the evidence was
strong enough to send his case to trial. >> All rise. >> You have a member of
the governor's cabinet who is still on the job
as the top health official in the state of Michigan on
trial for poisoning people. >> The prosecution has charged
Mr. Lyon with involuntary manslaughter. >> I think maybe that is
unprecedented. >> Based upon all of the
evidence in its totality, I find that the prosecution has
established that the following crimes have
been committed and probable cause exists to
believe that Nicholas Lyon has committed these offenses. >> NARRATOR: The judge ordered
Lyon to stand trial. Another judge would order
the same for Eden Wells. Both appealed the decisions, delaying the start of any
trials. And while the appeals were
dragging on... >> Change in political landscape
for our state... >> The biggest midterm election
in a generation... >> NARRATOR: The political
landscape in Michigan was changing with a new
governor. >> It was a dominating night
for Democrats, winning a number of key races,
including governor, attorney general... >> NARRATOR: And a new attorney
general, a Democrat who'd criticized the
investigation for not producing results. >> I think we have to take a
very close look at those investigations,
we have to re-evaluate, and I think we should have
career prosecutors handling those cases. >> NARRATOR: By the beginning of
2019, the fate of the investigation
was uncertain. With the criminal cases
in limbo, we were still trying to
determine the toll of the Legionnaires' outbreak. >> It's kind of like detective
work: You look at the evidence, you evaluate the circumstances, and then you start putting these
pieces together. >> NARRATOR: After months of
reporting and analysis, "Frontline" had documented
115 pneumonia deaths that happened in Flint
during the outbreak. In response to our findings, a spokeswoman for the state
health department told us they'd noticed an increase,
too, and concluded it was due to influenza. But independent scientists were
telling us that in all likelihood, some of them were actually due
to Legionnaires'. >> I took the information from
the death certificates, and I plotted out each one of
those deaths on a map, just to kind of see if anything
stood out. And in fact it did. In particular, the older parts
of the city. We found these clusters of
people that, around the same timeframe
as the switch, were dying of pneumonia and
dying of Legionnaires' disease. ♪ ♪ We're in Mott Park. >> NARRATOR: Mott Park is a
neighborhood on the west side of Flint where we found six
deaths attributed to pneumonia in the beginning of the
outbreak-- triple what it had been during
that time the previous year. >> Did you guys ever think there was something wrong
with the water? >> No, I didn't know anything
was wrong with the water. >> NARRATOR:
Loree Moore lived here with her nephew Marcus Wilson
during the summer of 2014, when Marcus was recovering
from cancer treatments. >> He was weak,
but he wasn't weak-weak. He was walking, he was doing
everything on his own. >> Did Marcus use the water here
a lot, did he...? >> Yes, he did. He drunk a lot of water. He would take showers and he
would sit in there for a long time and just
let the water run in his face. And I was, like,
"Marcus, you okay?" And he was, like,
"Man, that water feel good." And he would always just sit in
there and just, you know, let the water hit him in his
face, you know, in the chair. >> So he's sitting in there, hot
water, breathing it in right in his face?
>> Yes, yes. He would just sit there
in the chair and hold his face like this. >> NARRATOR: Back when the
outbreak was erupting in August 2014,
Marcus went to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed him
with pneumonia, never testing for Legionnaires'. A few weeks later, he was dead. Without testing, there was no
way to know for certain if Marcus Wilson or any of the
115 people we'd found had died of Legionnaires'. But what were the chances
that some of them had? >> I'm a beat reporter,
I'm not an epidemiologist. You can talk to families, you
can put dots on a map and make assumptions about
clusters, but at the end of the day,
you really do need an objective, independent review of that data. >> NARRATOR: So we took our
reporting to Atlanta, to Emory University, where a team of independent
epidemiologists we'd commissioned built
their own statistical model to analyze the data
we'd been collecting. >> What a statistical model
allows us to do is to really see the forest
for the trees, to look at whether or not the
difference that we saw in Genesee County was actually
statistically meaningful. >> NARRATOR: The team compared
the pneumonia deaths to a control group. >> The control group that we
chose for this analysis was counties that were similar
to Genesee County in many respects in terms
of their size, and income, and education level,
and socio-economic profile, but were both in Michigan
and in surrounding states. And so what we see here is that
when we start in 2011, we follow this mortality rate, they're pretty similar between
Genesee County and the controls. And they're pretty similar,
they're quite similar, and this continues until we get
to about the middle of 2014. And this is sort of where the
inflection point happens here. >> NARRATOR: The increase was
most pronounced in the first six months of 2014,
and less so in 2015. It's not clear why, since Flint
was still on river water then. >> Right when the Legionnaires'
epidemic starts, the pneumonia death rate in
Genesee goes up, while in the other counties,
it's going down. So, we got this very clear
divergence when you plot that over time. >> NARRATOR: After running
the numbers, the team concluded there'd been
about 70 more pneumonia deaths than normal. >> That means that there could
have been a little bit more than 70 and there could have
been fewer. However, the most plausible
number that we came up with from our models is 70. >> This is definitely consistent
with the idea that there were some
Legionnaires' cases that did not get diagnosed and therefore did not get
included in the official count
for the outbreak. It's likely that the
Legionnaires' outbreak was bigger than that reported
by official authorities. >> If physicians had a higher
level of awareness about the Legionnaires' disease
outbreak earlier than they did, it's possible that that could
have ultimately led to fewer cases and fewer deaths
due to Legionnaires'. >> NARRATOR: We presented our
findings and Emory's to former governor Rick Snyder,
who declined to comment. The state health department
also declined, citing pending litigation. The official death toll from
the outbreak remains 12 people. ♪ ♪ >> The Lord is your keeper. The sun shall not smite you by
day, nor the moon by night. >> Amen. >> NARRATOR: Looking further
into our data, we made another discovery: Of the people who were diagnosed
with Legionnaires' during the outbreak
and initially survived, at least 20 had since died. >> Jassmine D. McBride departed
this life on February the 12th, 2019, at St. Mary Mercy
Hospital. >> NARRATOR: In the end, Jassmine McBride couldn't
overcome the damage that had been done by the
Legionnaires' disease. >> What was the cause of her
death were complications as a result of Legionnaires'
disease. She had heart problems,
she had lung problems, she had kidney problems, and that resulted in her having
a cardiac arrest. >> If she could get up right
now, she would say, "I'm not suffering anymore from
Legionnaires' disease. "I'm not suffering waiting to
get a transplant. Thank God I'm free." Jassy, you're free. Rest in peace. (congregation applauding) >> She fought a good fight. She finished her course. And the victory is hers. >> (singing) >> She was angry
and she forgave them. She just wanted justice
to be served. (hymn continues) >> A big story we are following
tonight, outrage in the city of Flint,
Michigan. >> People of Flint, Michigan,
say they are horrified again. >> A shocking decision
from the newly Democratic attorney general's office. >> NARRATOR: Four months
later... >> A lot of us are really angry. And we want to see some justice. We want justice. >> NARRATOR: Michigan's new
attorney general had ousted Todd Flood
and most of his team, and appointed new prosecutors, who dropped all the charges
against Nick Lyon, Dr. Eden Wells,
and the other officials. >> When we first came into the
investigation, we had some very real concerns. >> Some major, major concerns. And when I looked at it,
like I told Fadwa-- and I think I may have told the
attorney general-- "We're going to have to start
from the beginning. We're gonna have to start
from scratch." >> NARRATOR: Despite two judges
ruling the cases should go to trial, the new prosecutors say the
previous investigation was "fundamentally flawed"
and failed to collect all available evidence. >> If we know the investigation
was not complete, you just simply cannot proceed. It's very important when we say
we dropped the charges is that these charges are
dismissed without prejudice, which means these charges could
be brought up again today. We're supposed to have
everything, look at it, and make a decision. That's not the way things
happened in this case. Millions and millions of dollars
have been spent on the Flint water
investigation. They've wasted three years
for zero. For nothing. >> Here's the thing. I know we worked tirelessly
to put a great case together and continue the investigation. I know that, right? And I can say that without
equivocation. And candidly, look, the facts
speak for themselves. We won. We got the cases bound over. We did things
the old-fashioned way of moving from the bottom and going up in the
investigation. And the investigation for us
was far from over. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: More than five
years after the start of the outbreak,
it remains to be seen whether any of the officials at
the center of the Flint water crisis will
be held responsible. >> Flint happened. People have to live with this
for years, and years, and years, and years, and years to come. We are interested in justice,
no matter how hard that is. We did not choose
the easy route, but we chose the route that
the people of Flint deserve. >> I'm more than skeptical. It makes no sense to drop
the charges, dismiss the investigation, to start from scratch
with the clock ticking. I guess time will tell, but I
suspect that justice delayed is going to be
justice forgotten. ♪ ♪ >> Believe me,
it's been a long five years. It's been five years too long. This is something that has not
really happened before. It was man-made. This was not a coincidence. This was thought out. It was calculated. It was decisions made. And those people must be held
accountable. ♪ ♪ >> For more on this and other
"Frontline" programs, visit our website
at pbs.org/frontline. ♪ ♪ To order "Frontline's"
"Flint's Deadly Water" on DVD, visit ShopPBS,
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. This program is also available
on Amazon Prime Video. ♪ ♪
not available
I have lost so much trust in government. What happened in Flint made me put a full home water filter on my parent's home.