A federal judge has approved a $626 million settlement in a lawsuit filed against the state of Michigan, the city of Flint and others on behalf of thousands of children affected by the Flint water crisis.
The same lead attorney in the Michigan case recently helped file two federal lawsuits claiming hundreds of children in Mississippi’s capital city of Jackson have also been harmed by dangerous levels of lead and lack of access to clean drinking water.
Corey Stern, one of the architects of the Michigan settlement, said in a statement that it’s the largest such settlement in Michigan history, representing more than 4,000 children. He recently said that Flint was the “canary in the coal mine” for other water crises including in Jackson.
“This settlement would not have been possible without the children and families of Flint relentlessly taking a stand against those who failed to keep them safe,” Stern said in a statement Wednesday. “… Although this is a significant victory for Flint, we have a ways to go in stopping Americans from being systematically poisoned in their own homes, schools and place of work. The big banks that financed Flint’s water supply switch in 2014, and the water engineering companies that failed to ensure the switch was safe still have not been held accountable …
“And similar cycles of environmental injustice are playing out in Benton Harbor where yet another Michigan city has denied predominantly Black and brown communities their rights to clean drinking water, and in Jackson, Mississippi, where I recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of 600 children who have also been exposed to lead in city-provided water.”
READ MORE: ‘The next Flint’: City of Jackson, state leaders sued over lead in drinking water
The Mississippi lawsuits claim that children were exposed to dangerous levels of lead for years and that numerous Jackson and state officials attempted to cover it up.
The lawsuits allege that the city learned of its lead problem within its water well system in 2013 and was warned again in 2014 but instead of addressing the problem, the city attempted a quick fix that made it worse.
The litigation was filed against the city of Jackson, the state Department of Health, Trilogy Engineering Services and other current and former city and state officials including Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Jackson’s water system is crumbling after years of neglected maintenance and upgrades. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said the system poses “imminent and substantial” danger to consumers.
READ MORE: Federal infrastructure bill won’t address Jackson water crisis without help of state leaders
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.