“Your human dignity shouldn’t be truncated because you’re priced out of the commodification of an essential resource.“ - Charity HicksAt 6:45 on Thursday morning, the Reverend Bill Wylie-Kellerman of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit sat down with nine othersblocking the entrance of the facility where Homrich Wrecking’s water shutoff trucks were set to leave for the day. By 8 a.m., the “Detroit Water 10” had been charged with disorderly conduct with bail set at $100 apiece. The goal of the protest was to appeal to Homrich contractors to stop shutting off water for Detroit’s poorest residents.
“The officers had bruised up two elderly ladies who were tied together protesting; they were grabbing their arms and their wrists so hard there were bruises on their wrists,” said DeMeeko Williams, an organizer with the Detroit Water Brigade. “They also pulled one of our handicapped men out of his wheelchair, he was out of the chair and on the ground. That’s abuse, I don’t care what anybody says.”
Approximately 12,000 Detroit residents have already had their water turned off since Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr announced the plan in spring to shut off homes delinquent on water payments of $150 to $160. UN resolution 64/292 declares that water and sanitation are basic human rights. After Detroit activists appealed to the United Nations, the UN declared the water shutoffs in Detroit were a violation of human rights.
Williams says denying a basic human right like water to a major portion of the population also creates a public health crisis.
“When people go without water there’s a lot of diseases, salmonella, poor sanitation, when you can’t flush your toilet... it's just an outbreak waiting to happen,” Williams said.
As reported in an earlier piece for Occupy.com, Kevyn Orr is one of several emergency managers appointed directly by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to make financial decisions on behalf of communities deemed to be in a state of fiscal emergency. The communities in which an unelected emergency manager has been appointed are overwhelmingly poor and black.
Michigan’s original emergency manager law was rejected by voters in a 2012 referendum. But the Republican-led legislature passed a new version into law shortly after, adding in language that says the law can’t be repealed by another voter referendum. The current emergency manager law is being challenged in federal court on constitutional grounds.