Shopping at Meijer recently, Mike Hood saw pallets stacked with bottled water–and began to cry. The bottles, he says, “represented so much trauma and pain I couldn’t even talk.”

Until last fall, Hood, fifty-five, and his life partner Laurie Carpenter, forty-three, took water for granted. You wanted a drink? You turned on the faucet. They’re lovers of the outdoors, and water also called to mind the serenity of the lakes where they love to canoe.

Last December, Hood, a former emergency medic, finished his course work at Eastern for a bachelor’s in social work. He planned to spend the summer leading rock-climbing and other trips through his company, Vertical Ventures, and had applied to grad school at EMU in the fall. Carpenter, already an MSW, worked as a researcher for U-M’s School of Public Health. They shared their home near Abbot School with three frisky dogs. Life was good.

Then they began paying attention to the news coming out of Flint, and everything changed.

Residents had been complaining about dirty-looking water coming out of their taps since April 2014, when the city switched its water source to the Flint River–a cost-cutting move dictated by a state emergency manager. Their concerns were brushed aside until last September, when Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards announced that, contrary to assurances from city and state officials, 20 percent of the water samples from Flint homes that his research team tested showed elevated levels of lead. A few weeks later, Hurley Hospital pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha announced that the number of Flint children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had doubled since the switch, from 2 to 4 percent. And there was a huge increase in cases of Legionnaires’ Disease, including twelve deaths; the rare pneumonia might have spread through the water system–nobody could tell for sure.

The story of the poisoned American city went global, with reporters besieging the once-prosperous factory town. Because the corrosive river water hadn’t been properly treated, it dissolved sediments in the city’s water pipes, producing the sludge residents had seen in their tap water. Invisibly, but more dangerously, it also dissolved lead from old pipes that, by one estimate, might be present in as many as 15,000 homes.

In the wake of the news blitz, Flint went back to buying water from Detroit. And a snarling blame game ensued in which everyone from Governor Snyder to the (now former) emergency manager to state and federal environmental authorities took part. Officials quit or were fired; by spring, a handful of state and city staffers would face criminal charges for failing to properly treat the river water and altering water quality tests.

As the story unfolded, Hood and Carpenter went from posting news stories about the water crisis online to driving to Flint to help distribute bottled water. Then, convinced that many residents needed more help, the couple founded a nonprofit they call Crossing Water. Its Facebook page describes the name as “a metaphor for safe crossing upon life’s uncharted waters.” Since January, they’ve raised about $11,000 on crowdwise.com.

With his newly flexible schedule, Hood began driving to Flint several days a week. By the end of January he had trained his first “rapid response service team,” volunteers who go door-to-door, installing water filters and assessing social service needs. “We serve the worst of the worst neighborhoods in Flint,” he says.

Hood describes the water disaster as “Michigan’s tsunami.” In a city already beset by deindustrialization and poverty, he says, it’s a “crisis on top of a long-term crisis, pushing people over the edge.”

While the city has put information on its website, Hood points out that many Flint residents don’t have computers or don’t know English. One of the first people the volunteers saw, Hood recalls, was a woman who spoke no English, was nursing her baby, and was boiling her drinking water believing that would make it safe (boiling kills bacteria but has no effect on lead). So Crossing Water rented twenty-two billboards warning, in English and Spanish, that boiling the city water didn’t make it safe to drink.

The Red Cross and government agencies quickly set up water and water filter distribution centers in central locations. But Carpenter points out that many residents don’t own cars, are physically incapacitated, or lack legal residency and shun public institutions. Some homes have faucets in such bad shape that most filters won’t fit. It doesn’t help, adds Ann Arbor businesswoman Margaret Schankler, that “most people don’t know anything about their sinks.” (Schankler now does: Crossing Water trained her to install filters, and she’s gone door-to-door in Flint about eight times.)

Hood’s outrage is such that he sometimes gives the impression that his little group of volunteers is all that stands between Flint residents and the pangs of dehydration. It’s not that extreme. Donations of water poured into Flint, and volunteers began distributing them. But Hood saw a problem.

“The Red Cross has a sizable presence,” says Hood, “but they will not go to people’s homes. They’ll hand them a filter. We’re grateful that they’re there. But we wish they had a much bigger mandate.”

“That’s probably a fair statement,” says local Red Cross administrator Tony Lasher. Lasher points out that some of their volunteers do go into homes–since January, they have been dropping off water and water testing kits weekly to homebound people. But he agrees that “we are not experienced in installing [filters]–we’re not comfortable having our volunteers who aren’t trained” do that.

Lasher–who calls Hood “a wonderful guy”–is more upbeat about the response to Flint’s plight. Noting that more than 180 groups and churches have volunteered in Flint at one time or another, he says, “the Red Cross has never seen such collaboration.”

In June, the EPA announced that filtered Flint tap water was now safe to drink, even for pregnant women and children. Lasher says “it’s very rare” for homes the Red Cross visits not to have working filters. But, he adds, Crossing Water is seeing people his group doesn’t. And Hood says that in the poor areas his group serves, 50 to 75 percent of residents don’t have a working filter.

“OK, kids! This is my daddy’s Southern fried chicken I made and some Greek potato salad.” Hood is calling Crossing Water’s volunteers to dinner. They join the couple and an Observer reporter at tables set up in the ground floor social hall of a church on Martin Luther King Ave. in Flint. The pastor of Salem Lutheran, Monica Villarreal, allows them to meet here and to store packs of bottled water, filters, and faucets–plus food, diapers, and other household necessities–upstairs. She even welcomes Hood and Carpenter’s dogs, who roam the building in a happy pack.

After an afternoon going door to door, the volunteers appear to enjoy the meal and camaraderie–something Hood believes is important to avoid burnout. He’s just back himself from an enforced rest to recover from pneumonia, possibly related to a life of stress, snatched meals, and inadequate sleep.

An alert, quick-on-the-uptake guy, sturdily built, with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts, Hood is volubly angry about the system that failed Flint, but shows warmth and caring to volunteers. A one-time dabbler in standup comedy, he mixes frequent F-bombs with occasional wisecracks. Carpenter, tall and trim, gets in about one word for every five of his, but she chooses them well and projects what a volunteer calls “an unruffled” mien. While holding down a full-time job in Ann Arbor, she’s in Flint every Saturday either going to homes or juggling administrative tasks.

A native of the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, she first met Hood about twenty years ago at an outdoor store, where they discovered a shared passion for rock climbing. They dated briefly and parted, and Hood married and divorced another woman. He and Carpenter reconnected, and five years ago he moved from Lansing to her Ann Arbor home.

Leading wilderness trips for troubled kids piqued Hood’s interest in social work. Usually the only male in his classes, Hood recalls with glee the time a teacher asked the class why they’d chosen social work. Typical answers, he recalls, were “‘I love people’ or ‘I want to help people.’ They get to me, and I say, ‘The world is a truly nasty place, and it needs its ass kicked, so that’s why I decided to be a social worker.'”

He’s seen raw poverty in other countries, but nothing in his life, he says, has shocked him like the Flint disaster: how it happened, how the residents’ worries were dismissed, and how half-hearted the official response seemed. “This is my state, my Michigan, and I’m outraged,” he says.

Gathered around the table, the volunteers describe their day’s work. Kevin Leeser, a nurse who passed up a day campaigning for Ann Arbor’s city council to be here, installed new faucets in three homes where the old ones wouldn’t hold a filter. University of Detroit Mercy grad student Andrew Campbell says that two people for whom he hooked up filters told him they wouldn’t use them–they feel safer drinking bottled water. “Trust is a really hard thing to get in this town,” Hood observes.

Each Crossing Water team includes a social worker or mental-health worker. Someone asks why more Flint social workers aren’t volunteering. Hood says that some do, and he doesn’t blame the others because they’re badly overworked: “The social work system chews up people like sausage in a grinder.”

Hood stresses that Crossing Water isn’t sharing the EPA’s announcement that filtered tap water is now safe for everyone to drink with its clients. “The problem with making the recommendation,” he says, “is saying that everyone can drink the water because the filter’s working. It makes the erroneous assumption that everyone has a working filter.”

Hood isn’t the only one feeling the pressure. Bryna Oleshansky, a recent U-M grad who works in the athletic department, has just completed her third day volunteering. After the first, she says, she was so upset she “screamed at my mother for forty-five minutes.”

That’s part of the reason for these end-of-day gatherings, Hood tells her–“so you do not bring the bad [things you see] home to your family.”

There is some good news. The latest water tests are finding less lead leaching out of the old pipes. In Hanna-Attisha’s blood tests, the number of children showing elevated levels is again at 2 percent–still cause for serious concern, but more likely caused by exposure to old lead-based paint than lead water pipes. And the state job service, Michigan Works, will soon post openings for “water quality liaisons.” Flint residents can earn $12 an hour doing the kind of door-to-door education and installation the Crossing Water volunteers have been doing for six months.

Hood admits that they need the help. “We’ve done 1,000 home visits,” he says. “We probably need to be in another 10,000 homes, but we’re just too small for that.” But just because bigger institutions will be sharing the load doesn’t mean the need for Crossing Water has passed.

“Our service is more expansive now,” Carpenter explains. While the first priority is still to make sure residents have access to uncontaminated water, the group recently started a nutrition program, and its teams try to address any other needs they find. “We put in a water heater,” Hood says. “We put in a furnace–whatever people need.”

When volunteers found a large family in an apartment with hardly any furniture, they collected and delivered beds and chairs. Another team came upon a group home for the developmentally challenged with no caregiver in residence. They installed a water filter–and called social services.

In early July, Hood was still grappling with what he’ll be doing this fall. Though he hopes to start an MSW program, he has no plans to abandon Flint.

“This family is growing,” he tells his volunteers. “It’s us against the world … We see ourselves being here a couple years.”