Organizational decision-making regarding the Legionnaire’s disease outbreak during the Flint water crisis

Michigan’s Flint Water Crisis received national attention in 2015 and 2016. Images of Flint residents holding bottles of muddy and rusty water circulated the internet with news articles explaining that a change in Flint’s water source contaminated people’s drinking water. Thousands of children and adults were exposed to lead and other toxic chemicals. An outbreak of the waterborne bacterial illness called Legionnaires Disease caused 91 people to fall ill and 12 people to die. More than eight years later, there is ongoing legal action against government officials who allowed for the contamination of Flint’s water.

Public officials involved in the Flint Water Crisis claim that the public health disaster was the result of negligence and poor communication by government offices. This study analyzes the mechanisms of how these government offices responded to the outbreak of Legionnaires Disease during the Flint Water Crisis, revealing that the response was more complicated than simple negligence. Qualitative analysis of government emails released by Governor Rick Snyder’s office was conducted to study the decision-making process of the Genesee County Health Department, the Michigan Health and Human Services Department, and the Department of Environmental Quality. The data in this study demonstrates that the government offices each strategically avoided taking responsibility for the investigation into the Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak. The implementation strategies of the governmental departments may represent racialized decoupling, a process where organizations reinforce racial disparities by separating their organization’s mission from the actions they take. The theory of racialized decoupling may describe some factors that contributed to governmental decision-making management of the Legionnaire’s Disease outbreak based on unfair ideas that people in Flint did not deserve help during the Flint Water Crisis.