DETROIT — When it comes to water, only about half of Americans are very confident in the safety of what’s flowing from their tap, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll, which found that trust is even weaker among minorities and people with lower incomes.
The lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, has been in the headlines for months, and more than half of Americans believe it’s a sign of widespread problems in the United States. About seven in 10 drink tap water, but about half of them first run it through a filter.
“Of all the water systems in the nation, Flint can’t be the only one that’s faulty,” said Elsbeth Jayne, 28, of Christiansburg, Virginia, who’s very comfortable with her own tap water.
Joseph Johnson, 46, of Brooklyn, New York, said he only drinks bottled water, spending about $8 a month on two cases. He’s among the 30 percent of Americans choosing water off the shelf.
“I’ve always been under the assumption that water wasn’t 100 percent clean. The Flint situation brought more of the story to the surface,” he said Friday.
Flint, with a population of about 100,000, was drawing water from the Flint River for 18 months as a way to save money until a new pipeline to Lake Huron was ready. But the corrosive water leached lead from the city’s old plumbing because certain treatments weren’t added. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, whose administration repeatedly downplayed the lead threat, now calls it a “disaster.”
No level of lead in the human body is considered safe, especially in children. The river water also may have been a source of Legionnaires’ disease, which killed at least nine people in the region.
The poll found only 47 percent of Americans say they’re extremely or very confident about the safety of their drinking water, while 33 percent say they’re moderately confident and 18 percent are not very confident or not at all.
Forty percent of African-Americans polled and 28 percent of Hispanics were less likely than whites – 54 percent – to be very confident in their water’s safety. Less than 40 percent of households making less than $50,000 are very confident.
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