Flint, MI Hasn't Had Clean Water In Over 1700 Days. Jaden Smith Wants To Help

By Lauren Rearick


It’s been 1,774 days since the city of Flint, Michigan, has had drinkable water, and right now Jaden Smith is helping residents affected by the crisis.


On Saturday (March 2), the actor’s company, Just Goods, donated a portable water filtration system to Flint’s First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church called the Water Box, which reflects the system Just uses to bottle its own Just Water, Michigan Live reports. The box was created in group effort with the church and Smith’s mother, Jada Pinkett-Smith, mentioned she would also be donating a second Water Box to the city.


“We don’t hope to disrupt what’s happening with the donation of bottled water to Flint,” Smith told those assembled at the box’s unveiling. “We just aspire to be the backbone in case something happens to that allocate of donated bottled water.”


As Catrina Tillman, first lady of First Trinity tells MTV News, the has passed out free bottled water to Flint residents since 2014, however recently experienced a reduce in donations. “We had to go from giving out water five days a week, down to three days a week,” she explains. “ We have to turn away a lot of residents simply because we don’t have the water distribute to give out like we once did,” she says. She hopes that the arrival of the Water Box, which processes up to 10 tidy gallons of water per minute, can change that.


As NPR reports, the Flint water crisis began in 2014, once city officials determined to stop using water supplied by Lake Huron and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSA) in lieu of a pipeline that could be built to connect Flint to the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA).


Since the pipeline would take an estimated 25 years to accomplish, Flint made a switch to temporarily use the Flint River as its water source. The city’s then-mayor, Dayne Walling, celebrated the move as “a historic moment for the city of Flint to return to its roots and use our own river as our drinking water supply.”


Yet, a study later discovered that the river water held chloride and was causing lead to leak from the pipes into the water allocate that residents were drinking and using. Water with lead is particularly dangerous to children, causing possible developmental delays, comas, and even death. The city later switched back to Lake Huron for its water issue, yet it’s thought that more than 100,000 people were potentially affected by the water.


Since 2016, Flint has been working with the Environmental Protection Company to improve their water pipelines and allocate free bottled water, CNN reports. Yet, the free bottled water program was terminated in 2018 by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who argued that the water was right now “well within standards,” CNN reports. Several residents disagreed, including current Flint mayor Karen Weaver, who argued in a statement published by Detroit Free Press that “free bottled water should be supplied to the people of Flint up until the last-known lead-tainted pipe has been replaced.”


As Tillman tells MTV News, sourcing enough water bottles for residents is an ongoing challenge. Enter Smith and Drew Fitzgerald, the founders of Just Goods, who proposed their help to First Trinity. “They heard of the work that we have been doing and so they wanted to be able to see how they could help our water mission,” she says. Immediately after a collective brainstorm with firms that included Just Goods, First Trinity, Black Millennials for Flint and 501C3, it was determined to bring a portable water box to Flint.


The Water Box includes a filtration system that cleans water of potentially unsafe drinking materials, including lead. Moreover, an off-site testing lab conducts continual testing of the box’s water and results are posted online.


Krystina White, chief operating officer of Black Millennials for Flint, tells MTV News that several in the community continue to rely solely on water bottles. “[They’re] are wonderful, however they harm the environment and are not sustainable,” she mentioned. “How several water bottles can you give to a family member of four to shower with, eat with, and cook with? It gets to be sort of impossible. This Water Box is sort of revolutionary in that people can come just once and take ten gallons of water home.”


Tillman notes that the church will continue to allocate some water bottles, although she hopes the Water Box can “eradicate” the required for them. Eventually, the firms would like to bring added Water Boxes to Flint. In the meantime, they’re asking the public for help, encouraging sponsorship of future Water Boxes, which cost $50,000, and asking for donations to buy 5-gallon jugs that residents can use and bring back for future fillups.


“It’s a large deal to go from water bottles to something that can distribute ten gallons of water per minute, while filtering out the lead,” White says. “Now we’re talking about a solution that will assist people take showers. It’s not just drinking the water, that’s not the only thing that’s needed.”