“The infrastructure already was in place,” she said.īut for GM’s Flint workers, the engine corrosion was an unsettling sign. (The engine factory was once within the township, before it was annexed by the city in the 1970s.)Īs a result, it was relatively easy to tap into the township’s pipes, Flint Township Treasurer Marsha Binelli explained in an interview last week. That was an option only because of the plant’s location on the boundary of Flint Township. It was then that GM began working through the bureaucratic red tape of extracting itself from its Flint water contract and hooking into the township, which uses water treated by Detroit. The remediation efforts proved time consuming and costly, Wickham said. Additional water was trucked in to dilute chloride levels. They used reverse osmosis, an advanced and pricey purification process. The 1.2-million-square-foot plant makes engines used in the Buick Enclave crossover, Chevrolet Cruze compact and Colorado pickup and other vehicles.įor months, factory officials tried to make it work. It was in summer 2014, many months before the problem of corroding lead pipes would morph into a public-health calamity and national media maelstrom.įor GM, the problem was not lead but the elevated levels of chloride in the treated river water - added to remove solids and contaminants - that began to cause “visible corrosion damage on parts coming out of the machining process,” GM spokesman Tom Wickham said last week. Plant officials were among the first people in Flint to detect something wrong. The workaround was made possible by the factory’s fortuitous location and some heads-up planning. In December 2014, the plant switched from Flint’s tainted water system to a fresh supply from neighboring Flint Township - an option that was not afforded other Flint residents and businesses.Īs a result, the plant was able to sidestep a crisis that has befallen everyone else in the city where GM was born more than a century ago. “The water was rusting the blocks,” Dan Reyes, president of UAW Local 599, which represents the plant’s nearly 900 workers, recalled in an interview last week. Soon after Flint made its ill-fated switch in 2014 to Flint River water from the costlier Detroit municipal system, officials at GM’s engine plant here flagged a big problem: corrosion caused by high levels of chloride in the water. General Motors, the biggest employer in Flint, might also be its luckiest water customer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |