Rasheed Wallace pleads for support amid Flint water crisis

The cameras are long gone, but Rasheed Wallace is still on the ground in Flint, Mich., where the water continues to be contaminated by lead.

Wallace, the beloved former champion of the Detroit Pistons, has been delivering clean drinking water to Flint by the truckload for over a year. He describes the much-maligned city as a "third-world country" in America.

Seeking to bring attention to the water crisis, Wallace penned a piece for The Players' Tribune that outlined the situation in Flint and how it came to be, and made an impassioned plea for continued support.

What if this had happened in New York? You mean to tell me that the people of Flint - just because it wasn’t a natural disaster - can’t get no help? That’s ludicrous! The government just approved funding at the beginning of October, nearly two years after we learned that the water was fucked up. What took so long?

And that’s just a long-term fix - money for big-picture projects. It’s $170 million for a multibillion-dollar problem. It does nothing for the people who need clean water right now.

To make matters worse, I haven’t seen any water trucks up there. Why isn’t anybody sending up any water?

You want to hear the real ass-kicker, though?

The city stopped buying treated water from Detroit and started using water from the Flint River in 2014. (Governor Snyder says he didn’t know the water in the river was contaminated, but state officials sent bottled water to government workers in Flint in January 2015, even though they were telling the residents that the water was safe.) Whether they knew it or not, when the government switched the water supply, it endangered the lives of everyone in the city.

And, to this day, the people of Flint still have to pay their water bills - they have to pay for water this is still unsafe and contaminated.

That’s right. They still want those people to pay their motherfucking water bills.

You can read this and ignore it. You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about. Look, I’m not a water expert. I’m not a scientist. But I’ve been to Flint. I’ve seen what’s happening. We have a third-world situation still going on in the United States of America. That’s the truth.

The cameras are gone, but the people are still there, and they still need our help.