As legal theater, the long trial of two engineering firms for their role in the Flint, Mich., water crisis ended with a thud. A federal jury in Ann Arbor, Mich., earlier this month deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial. For ENR’s news team, the trial was partly about whether the two engineering firms accused of negligence, LAN and Veolia, were culpable and owed damages to three children, the plaintiffs, who were exposed to lead in the city’s drinking water in 2014 and 2015. Critical aspects of engineering ethics were also being evaluated.
