FLINT, Mich. — Residents here haven’t yet marched on city hall or the governor’s office with pitchforks and blazing torches. But if they did, a lot of people might not blame them.

Flint has plenty of troubles: devastating job and population losses, plummeting property values, and a succession of emergency managers over the past four years.

The latest outrage is about water. Water that is discolored and foul-smelling. Water that at first had too much bacteria and then too much disinfectant.

And water that now seems to be causing lead poisoning in some of Flint’s children. One woman, whose husband works as a policy planner for city government, said her spouse was “in tears as a new father himself when an irate resident came in with her premature, lead-poisoned baby.”

Flint’s water saga goes back to last year, when officials announced that their cash-strapped city could no longer afford to buy water from Detroit.

They announced they would join a new consortium, the Karegnondi Water Authority, which would supply purified water from Lake Huron. But Karegnondi’s operation won’t be up and running until sometime the following year.

So Flint officials announced that in the meantime, they would supply residents with treated water from the Flint River. But that turned into a disaster from almost day one. There were reports that the water was discolored and foul-tasting.

When tests showed that the water was dangerously contaminated with bacteria, including the infamous E. coli, the city pumped chlorine into the water.

That backfired too: In January, residents were told their water didn’t meet federal safety standards, this time because of the chlorine.

While it may have killed the bacteria, it left the water with high levels of trihalomethane (TTHM), which is thought to increase the chances of developing cancer.

Average levels of TTHM didn’t become acceptable until late this summer. Then Flint had a terrifying new problem: lead poisoning.

Last week, a study by physicians at Hurley Medical Center in Flint showed that the tap water in Flint has resulted in significantly elevated levels in the blood of the city’s children. The scientists said the lead isn’t actually in the water, but that the river water itself was more corrosive than the lake water Flint had been buying from Detroit.

A team from Virginia Tech tested samples last month from 300 homes, and found what it called “seriously” high levels of lead. The Hurley study found the percentage of children with seriously elevated lead levels had almost doubled.

That got politicians’ attention. Mayor Dayne Walling advised residents to use only cold water, let it run from the tap for five minutes, and buy a filter for lead removal. The mayor also asked Gov. Rick Snyder to come up with $30 million to fix the water system and replace lead pipes.

City officials say about half the customers in Flint may be facing a problem, because the transmission lines connecting them to city water mains are made with lead.

The mayor’s request for money from the governor wasn’t good enough for the editorial board of the Flint Journal, the city’s newspaper. When the news of lead poisoning surfaced, it ran an editorial saying “it’s time to abandon the Flint River” as a drinking water source.

“We call on the governor to make this right for Flint citizens by brokering a return to Detroit water that won’t bankrupt the city of Flint,” the editorial said. It added: “Flint is in a crisis that was created in no small part by Snyder’s hand-picked emergency manager, and it is Snyder’s job to fix this mess.”

Yet the governor has shown no signs of doing any such thing.

Pat Clawson, a longtime Flint area resident and former investigative reporter, thinks his city’s plight should be a national scandal. “They are poisoning the people with this water — poisoning them, and that’s what the doctors call it among themselves,” he told me.

He puts the lion’s share of the blame on Mayor Walling, who he says “was involved in planning and promoting the switch to Flint River water from the start.”

But Mr. Clawson says there is plenty of blame to go around: “I believe there is criminal culpability on the part of public officials for causing and concealing this crisis.”

He urged the federal and state governments to convene grand juries to investigate. Whether that will happen is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, the agony continues for the 99,000 folks who still live in the once-prosperous city of Flint.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

First Published October 2, 2015, 4:00 a.m.