- Last year, Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation donated over $480,000 to install new water fountains at schools in Flint. This is an update on the project.
When Elon Musk is not busy running companies like Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, he is also an active philanthropist. Musk is the chairman of the Musk Foundation, which has donated solar power systems to Alabama after a hurricane and Japan following a tsunami. And last year, Musk and the Musk Foundation donated more than $480,000 to install new water fountains with filtration systems in order to provide access to clean water at Flint, Michigan schools due to the Flint water crisis.
Now these systems are going through testing and it should be available for use in the next few weeks. According to MLive, the Flint Community Schools Board of Trustees approved a proposal to pay $19,558 to Arch Environmental Group for performing the water testing and flushing. This includes flushing running water and testing the water pre-filtration and post-filtration system installation.
Musk’s donation will be used for paying for water filtration systems across all 12 Flint school buildings along with the administration building. And the School board members had approved of a water cooler/bottle filler system from Murdock Manufacturing for $221,000 in December 2018.
“We are deeply grateful for the generosity and the budding partnership between Flint Community Schools, the Musk Foundation and Elon Musk. The new water filtration systems will be instrumental in helping our students return to the normalcy of what should be a fundamental right: having access to safe, clean water from water fountains in their school,” said Flint Community Schools Superintendent Derrick Jones Lopez, PhD, JD in a statement.
Musk is also planning to help homeowners and residents of Flint by installing a water filtration system to any home in the city that had toxic water:
Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2018
And Musk also donated over $400,000 for Google Chromebook laptops that can be used by seventh and eighth-grade students for educational purposes.
Featured image credit: JD Lasica
