Source: Bill Pugliano / Getty
Many people want to do what they can to help the residents of Flint through it’s water crisis. Filmmaker Michael Moore says, “Unfortunately, the honest answer to your offer of help is, sadly, you can’t.” Many disagree and believe they can help, as thousands of bottles of water are being sent to Flint daily.
Moore wrote an open letter on his website stating, “The reason you can’t help is that you cannot reverse the irreversible brain damage that has been inflicted upon every single child in Flint. The damage is permanent.”
Moore, a Flint native, is asking everyone to stop sending bottles of water. He says bottled water is a temporary fix. He also says there will need to be a new landfill made just to put all of the empty bottles. Moore stated on his website, “Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I’m not counting toilet flushes, watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is enough for just one bottle per person – in other words, just enough to cover brushing one’s teeth for one day. You would have to send 200 bottles a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in Flint) needs each day. That’s 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water – which equals 20.4 million 16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we’ll need to find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further).”
Moore poses the solution to the problem is having FEMA deliver water systems to each home. He says each home should have 2 large 55 gallon drums that FEMA will fill daily with fresh glacial water from Lake Huron. Moore has also called for the arrest of Governor Rick Snyder as part of his plan, and he even started a petition for his arrest. So far the petition has nearly 500,000 signatures.
You can read more of what Moore has to say here, and find out how YOU can help Flint below.
To donate, text “WATER” to 91999.
