Activist Melissa Mays on the Flint Water Crisis.

Photo politicscentral.org

Contributed to Purple Walrus Press by Melissa Mays of Flint.

Good morning everyone! Enjoy some of my sass as I talk about living in the #FlintWaterCrisis and fighting back. I just read what I said and sugar coated, it is not. Please call your Senators and Congressional Reps and demand they fund infrastructure for Flint. We need new mains, interior Plumbing and fixtures replaced. It's 1285 days since we've had clean water. And counting. Also, "Flint" airs again this Friday (11/3) on Lifetime at 8 pm EST

Read this article about Flint Water Crisis activist Melissa Mays that is written by Melanie McFarland of Salon.com.

Generally by the time Lifetime has gotten around to making a movie based on a true story, the headline-generating event in question typically has concluded. Not so with “Flint,” the cable channel’s fictionalized depiction of the Flint water crisis. When it debuts Saturday at 8 p.m. keep in mind that people like Melissa Mays and Nayyirah Shariff, activists depicted in the film by Marin Ireland and Jill Scott, are still contending with toxic water being piped into their homes.

Although Flint is in the process of replacing an estimated 20,000 lead-tainted water lines, that work isn’t required to be complete until 2020. In the meantime, Mays told Salon, “the longer they're waiting to pull the pipes out, the bacteria's worse, all the different cancer-causing byproducts are worse.”

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The water caused the spread of Legionnaires' disease, a potentially fatal lung infection.

Showering hurts, Mays said. “In Flint, the shower smells of chemicals. It burns your eyes, your nose. We have two shower head filters, and it still burns,” Mays said. “If you get a rash, every time the water touches it, it burns all over again . . . I cut my finger cooking and I almost put my hand under the sink, and you have to stop because it burns like fire. But also there's bacteria in there, which causes MRSA. We have a lot of skin infections.”

Even without wounds, Mays said, the water “makes your hair feel like straw, like you've had a ton of hairspray on it. Your skin starts to peel off your face. We're not even taking hot showers anymore because the bacteria and the cancer-causing byproducts are released into steam and you breathe it in. That's how people have died.”