A year ago, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder chose an unfortunate metaphor to launch his second term in office. During his state of the state address in January 2015, the Republican governor shared his vision for bringing all Michigan residents into a “river of opportunity.”

Clearly, he didn’t mean the Flint River, which was the source of a health emergency that has grown over the past 21 months and turned into an appalling political scandal that reaches the governor. Call it Snyder’s “river of failure.”

By the time the embattled governor delivered his 2016 State of the State address Tuesday evening, he had already admitted that the crisis in Flint, where contaminated tap water from the river has caused widespread lead poisoning and possibly an outbreak of Legionnaires disease that has killed 10 people, was a failure of his leadership.

For many of the 99,000 residents of Flint, a struggling industrial town about 70 miles northwest of Detroit, the state’s slow response to the crisis has sparked outrage and calls for the governor’s resignation.

The troubles began in 2014, when Flint, under the leadership of a state-mandated emergency manager, opted to switch the city’s water source to the Flint River from a Detroit-operated pipeline from Lake Huron, a move that would save an estimated $5 million over two years while the city waited to connect to another, new pipeline back to Lake Huron.

The switch sparked immediate complaints from residents who were alarmed by the brown, smelly water flowing from their kitchen faucets. Soon after, local doctors noticed a spike in children coming in with unexplained rashes and hair loss. After more than a year of complaints — and repeated reassurances from local and state officials — a Flint pediatrician presented blood tests that revealed an alarming increase in the number of toddlers with high levels of lead in their systems, which can cause permanent brain damage, since the water source switch.

The city was being poisoned.

It turns out that state regulators had failed to require Flint to properly treat the river water, which was more corrosive than the Lake Huron water the city used to pipe in. The corrosive water running through Flint’s aging lead pipes caused the metal to leach into the city’s tap water. Growing evidence of toxic water was ignored — some allege it was covered up — by state and local officials, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

There has been plenty of blame to go around. In Michigan, it has stretched from the governor to the Genesee County drain commissioner.

Lead-contaminated water flowed for more than a year in Flint, which finally stopped sourcing its water from the river in October. The water flowing through the city’s lead-leaching pipes is still considered undrinkable, though.

So much damage has been done it’s difficult to determine which piece of this man-made disaster is most egregious.

Is it the original decision to tap the Flint River? Well, yes. That’s what started this mess. As the Detroit News reported Thursday, emails released by the governor’s office show a former state treasurer made “the ultimate decision” to let Flint leave the Detroit water system, acting on a request from Flint officials.

But the cascade of red flags, bad decisions and government inaction since then has endangered tens of thousands of people and is expected to cost the state more than $1.5 billion to fix.

Angry residents say Snyder should’ve acted sooner to address health concerns and ensure Flint had safe water. The governor didn’t publicly acknowledge the problem until October, more than a year after the first complaints.

Relief is coming, slowly, to the people of Flint, who have become dependent on bottled and filtered water for bathing, cooking and drinking — an unheard-of way of life in the United States, where clean, potable water is expected. In recent weeks, the state has stepped up efforts to help Flint. The National Guard is distributing clean water. The Obama administration granted $5 million in federal emergency funding, but denied the governor’s request for a more sweeping federal disaster declaration.

The most damning lesson from the emails released by the governor is that for months no one at any level of government owned this disaster. No one created a sense of urgency to save Flint. It was too convenient to think of it as someone else’s responsibility, until it was too late. Until the adults and children of Flint had lead coursing through their bodies.

“I’m sorry most of all that I let you down,” Snyder said Tuesday, so heartfelt, and so appallingly late.

— Chicago Tribune