FIA

Flint Institute of Arts - The Flint Institute of Arts is the second largest art museum in the State of Michigan and one of the largest museum art schools in the nation. Each year, more than 160,000 people visit the FIA’s galleries (free of charge) and participate in FIA programs and services.

The Flint Institute of Music - FIM

The FIM is made up of The Flint Symphony Orchestra, Flint School of Performing Arts and The Flint Youth Theatre. Nearly 300,000 visits are made to these programs annually. The Flint Institute of Music offers music and dance lessons for all levels and Drama School for ages 3 years to grade 12. Students perform in the dance and performance ensembles such as Flint Youth Symphony Orchestra, Flint Youth Ballet Ensemble, Dort Honors Quartet, Imrpov Squad, among several others. The Flint Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Enrique Diemecke, performs a full season of classical concerts as well as free Music in the Park concerts at Genesse area parks in the Summer season. Additionally, the FIM sponsors the Holiday Pops concert every holiday season, featuring the Flint Symphony Orchestra, Flint Festival Chorus and local choirs. FIM's production of the Nutcracker ballet has been a local tradition for over 30 years. The FIM is also a home base for the annual William C. Byrd Young Artists Competition.

The Flint Cultural Center (FCC) is a campus of institutes located in Flint, Michigan. It is dedicated to promoting area residents with an array of cultural, scientific, and artistic experiences and promotes understanding of the diverse cultures reflected in the Greater Flint community.

The institutions located on the grounds of the FCC are the Sloan Museum, Buick Gallery & Research Center, Flint Institute of Arts, Robert T. Longway Planetarium, The Whiting, Flint Youth Theatre, and the Flint Institute of Music.

University of Michigan—Flint is a public institution that was founded in 1956. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,585, its setting is city, and the campus size is 76 acres. The University's implementation of the UM Storm Water Management Program; the Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Plan; Contractor & Construction Safety requirements; River Restoration and Clean-Up initiatives and general involvement are just some of the efforts underway to protect the Flint River.

The Flint River is a 78.3-mile-long river in the Flint/Tri-Cities region of Michigan in the United States. The river's headwaters are in Columbiaville in Lapeer County and flows through the counties of Lapeer, Genesee, and Saginaw.

The river forms in Lapeer County near Columbiaville where the river's South Branch and North Branch come together. Its volume is supplemented by numerous creeks, including: Kearsley Creek, Thread Creek and Swartz Creek in Genesee County, and Misteguay Creek in Saginaw County. The river flows in a southwesterly direction past Flint before turning northward near Flushing. It empties into the Shiawassee River in the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge near the city of Saginaw, as do the Bad River and Cass River. The Shiawassee then converges with the Tittabawassee River to form the Saginaw River. The Saginaw empties into the Saginaw Bay of Lake Huron.

The river has suffered from decades upon decades of industrial pollution, although cleanups following the Clean Water Act mean that pollution is vastly improved from the 1950s and 1960s.

The water in the Flint River has high levels of chlorides (thought to be the result of, in part, road salt), making it highly corrosive to lead pipes. Chlorides do not pose a direct threat to fish, wildlife, or humans, but cause problems because they corrode lead and other metals in piping and plumbing. A study conducted by Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, a leading authority on water quality, showed that the Flint River water corrodes lead pipes at 19 times the rate of water piped from Detroit.

Bidell Graves

The river has the same fishing advisory as the Great Lakes. Fish in the river include smallmouth bass, walleye, and some trout.

Lead Testing - Flint River Watershed Coalition tested for lead and each test showed no indication of lead in the river itself. Staff tested in three locations, including downstream of the waste water treatment plant. Results indicate that so far the lead from the City’s water supply is not being found in the Flint River in detectable amounts.

Treating river water for drinking water is very different from treating water from large, continuous bodies of surface freshwater, such as Lake Huron. Rivers generally contain a greater — and often varying — concentration of organic materials, such as decaying leaves and fish waste. These are naturally-occurring materials found in healthy aquatic ecosystems. Our data show the Flint River is indeed a strong aquatic ecosystem. It was not the quality of the Flint River that caused the high bacterial levels, violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act for TTHM, the lead crisis and possible link to the Legionnaires outbreak.

It was improper treatment of the water, rather than the health of the river itself, that sparked the suite of issues with Flint’s drinking water.

The Hamilton Dam exists downstream at the University of Michigan–Flint campus in downtown Flint. Constructed in 1920, it once also served as a pedestrian bridge, but is now in severe disrepair.

Decades of studies have shown elevated blood lead levels can stunt mental growth in young children, and, in high concentrations, later lead to delinquent or sometimes violent behavior. In the classroom, low blood-lead levels in a child can translate into lower reading and math scores. Many experts say no level of lead is safe for children.

In 2014, to save money, the state switched Flint's water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a tributary notorious for its filth. The Department of Environmental Quality failed to treat the corrosive water, which ate into the city's iron and lead pipes, causing lead to leach into the drinking water.
The next year, researchers and medical personnel discovered high levels of lead in residents, especially children. Lead has been tied to a host of medical problems, especially in the nervous system.
People experienced rashes and hair loss when high levels of lead were found in the local water supply.
The city switched back to the Lake Huron water supply in October 2015. In January 2016, the governor declared a state of emergency, one month after the city's mayor did.
Flint leaders have said the lead level of the city's water supply has been reduced since the city switched back to Lake Huron, but they still urge residents to install water filters in their homes. The state has handed out free water filters, which the city recommends residents use before drinking or cooking with Flint tap water.

The Flint River is a vibrant ecosystem that supports a growing population of species such as eagles and ospreys, who live along and hunt in the Flint River.

Any Michigan community that draws its municipal water from a river or inland source rather than from one of the Great Lakes will likely face this problem to some extent. River and inland-source water contains higher concentrations of chloride ions than does water pumped directly from one of the Great Lakes. Why? Perhaps surprisingly, one of the primary reasons is the overuse of salt to deice our roads in the winter. As salt molecules dissolve in water, the negative chloride ions are separated from the positive metal ions. These chloride ions become concentrated in runoff, which makes its way into our streams, rivers, and other waterways.

The negative chloride ions are corrosive, so when the high-chloride water is pumped through lead pipes (or iron and copper pipes joined together with lead solder), lead leaches into the water. It's as simple as that.

Why isn't this happening to the same degree in other places, like Detroit for example? Surely Detroit has old lead pipes, too. Right? Absolutely. But Detroit draws its municipal water directly from the Great Lakes, and water pumped from the big lakes simply isn't as corrosive.

Because the Flint River (with its concentration of chloride ions) flows into the Saginaw River, which in turn empties into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron, it naturally follows that there are chloride ions in Lake Huron as well. However, the Great Lakes are huge, containing quadrillions of gallons of freshwater. With so much water in the big lakes, the existing chloride ions are greatly diluted and much less concentrated than they are in the water of smaller, inland streams like the Flint River. Sometimes dilution really is a solution to pollution.

Dort Factory One - General Motors opened the restored Durant-Dort Factory One, considered to be the company’s birthplace and epicenter of the global auto industry.

Factory One’s archive is free to use and contains about 100,000 historical documents, photos and other artifacts related to carriage-building and early automobile manufacturing in the Flint area, as well as GM history.

Located just north of downtown Flint, the factory dates to 1880, when it was built by the Flint Woolen Mills company as a short-lived venture into cotton textiles. In 1886, William Crapo “Billy” Durant and business partner Josiah Dallas Dort leased the facility and formed the Flint Road Cart Company – which became the Durant-Dort Carriage Factory and one of the largest carriage builders in the world.

Eventually, Durant would take control of another company – Buick Motor Co. – and leverage his Durant-Dort resources to grow the young automaker into one of the most successful car companies in the country. Durant used Buick’s success to build General Motors in 1908 and turned to his friends from Flint’s carriage industry to form Chevrolet in 1911.

The carriage market eroded with the seismic societal shift to automobiles, and the Durant-Dort Carriage Company ended production at Factory One in 1917. The building and others in the complex were converted to manufacture automobiles for the new Dort Motor Company until that business ceased operations in 1924.

In the more-than 130 years since Durant and Dort set up shop at Factory One, it housed countless other businesses and was renovated in the 1980s, before falling into disrepair.

GM purchased Factory One in 2013 and transformed it, with the goal of preserving and showcasing the original architecture.

The renovation of Factory One as a modern archive and research center brings the facility full circle, preserving the shared heritage of GM and Flint as a learning tool for future generations.

The river remediation project- A manufactured gas plant was operational along the remediation site from 1871-1928, with Consumers Energy purchasing the facility in 1922 and placed it on standby in 1928 before its retirement in 1951.

Manufactured gas plants converted coal and oil to gas for heating and cooking among other uses, which led to a coal tar by-product as part of the process.

The remediation process is set to include installation of a multi-layer protective barrier in the river, treating and discharging water from the dewatered sediment, as well as the removal and disposal of sediment and soil in an approved off-site landfill after being first placed on a pad in the Consumers Energy parking lot.

A cap of clean clay, sand, and rock will go on the river bottom along with the replanting of vegetation and replacement of benches and picnic tables once the work is completed.

Consumers Energy is expected to "bear the majority of this cost.

KS9A0461

Almost half of the people in the city of Flint are living in poverty.
In a city that once boasted the highest median income in the state thanks to General Motors, new U.S. Census data shows today there are nearly 43,000 people living under the poverty level, which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists as $11,880 for a single individual.

Flint has the nation's highest poverty rate among U.S. cities with at least 65,000 residents, according to 2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census released its estimate of 2016 poverty rates last week for the nation's largest 599 municipalities.

The Bureau estimated that 45 percent of Flint residents lived below the poverty line in 2016, up from 42 percent in 2015.

Flint also had the highest rate of childhood poverty with an estimated 58 percent of Flint residents under age 18 living below the poverty line. The national rate is 18 percent.

City planning, lack of economic diversity and increased competition for funding and resources with the suburbs all played a part in the Flint's leading poverty rate, experts say.

The State of Michigan has agreed to spend $87 million in a proposed settlement to replace thousands of lead pipes throughout Flint over the next three years, the latest effort by state and city officials to fix the contaminated water system.

The state is to provide free bottled water and to conduct extensive testing of Flint’s tap water for lead in the coming months. By January 2020, the agreement says, the city will have replaced pipes in and around thousands of homes — perhaps 18,000 of them — a project to replace corroded lead pipes. Pipes made of lead or galvanized steel are expected to be replaced with copper.

Four contractors were awarded the work after a controversial re-bid in March and are being paid from a $100 million grant from the federal Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act and a $20 million match from the state Department of Environmental Quality and Children Health Insurance grants.

If a contractor does not make their deadline, Flint will consider forcing the contractors to pay back the money for work they didn't complete. Both WT Stevens and Lang were notified in August that they were behind schedule.

Residents are entitled to lead testing of their water four times a year. Residents who are homebound may receive deliveries of bottled water, and nine distribution centers will offer free bottled water, filters and replacement cartridges for filters.