I hardly think that this was intentional. Not every news story is a conspiracy against the people, you know. There is no motive, no reason, and wanton malice is one reserved only for Golden Age Comic Book Villains.

It would make more sense as a conspiracy theory if this happened over all of Michigan, or even all of the county. The water infrastructure in Michigan is an ancient, labyrinthine, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of above-ground sources across the whole state. Flint's water system is soon to reach two centuries in age, so it actually totally makes sense that something like this would happen, after ceasing their water lease agreement with Detroit. Those are old pipes that were abandoned for a long time, and some are made of lead. One and a half centuries of heavy industry in that whole area are bound to poison the sediment of the Flint River. It may be a goddamned retarded oversight, but I don't think there's anything to read into beyond that.

That's one of the reasons why I drink bottled water. Your capacity to get hurt by something bad in water is so much worse than ingestion. If anything bad goes into your body at a more that acceptable amount you usually drink more water naturally and flush it out. That doesn't completely solve the problem but it mitigates it. Imagine instead that it's coming from the water. You are fucked. That's (one) reason why drugs are prescribed as pills instead of just doping you water supply, another is practicality. If you are prescribed slightly more than what would be ideal it's no big deal but if it's in water even the smallest over dosing is devastating. I drink bottled water not because I assume tap water is unsafe. I drink it because I'm assuming over the course of an entire life time, at least once somebodies going to fuck up and water is just too important to trust to a government. Michigan isn't the only place where municipalities have failed to maintain water quality. Even if less severe there was a spike in fetal deaths in DC due to lead and a direct correlation with fetal deaths can be linked to DC's lead problem over many years. The problem has never been really solved. If fetuses are dieing then surviving children aren't having the true natural experience of life at minimum, with its experience of nearly unlimited mental capacity the truly healthy experience and it can't be good for adults either. That one spike also shows that you never know what's going to go wrong. If it's less than perfect now you can expect it to be 30x worse for at least one particular year in your lifetime. If you are particularly unlucky you will live in a spot where it will be more than 30x worse. Government fucking up your water by shear incompetence is far more likely than getting blown up by a terrorist.

If a municipality produces less than perfect water, a few mothers go to a local meeting and ask for better water and maybe over the course of the next year they might do something about it and all is forgiven no matter how bad it got. People (fetuses) actually died in DC from water quality and no one batted an eye and probably most residents forgot about it within two summers. Compare that to a commercial bottling company. If they mess up in even the smallest respect their brand is hosed forever and the company disappears. It's like less than a dollar a day to drink. Anyone who says it's just tap water, yeah, it's tap water from a municipality that the company specifically selected as the best and doesn't want to loose it's largest manufacturer and the company takes it through extra filtration and the input water is constantly monitored so shit like what happened in Michigan can't happen without someone noticing or the plant simply moving equipment to their other plant while one source is bad.

The moral of the story, don't trust government even once for something that is truly important. We could apply similar lessons about personal security too. Don't put 100% reliance on them once because the one day that it matters it will be too late to see how big a mistake that was.