Miss Michigan may not have wowed the judges enough to make it to the final rounds of this year’s Miss America competition, but she certainly earned some admiration online.
Emily Sioma, who competed in Sunday’s pageant representing Michigan, used her introduction as a chance to make a statement about her state’s ongoing water crisis.
“From a state with 84 percent of the U.S. fresh water but none for its residents to drink, I am Miss Michigan, Emily Sioma,” she said during the broadcast.
Sioma was applauded by many Twitter users for using her platform to bring up the issue of the Michigan water crisis on a national level.
Sioma, who did not end up advancing to the next level of the competition, appears to have been citing a statistic from the Environmental Protection Agency, which reports that the Great Lakes make up 84 percent of North America’s surface fresh water.
The trouble with Sioma’s summary of that statistic is that the Great Lakes are not limited to just Michigan. They include Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, and stretch for more than 750 miles. Different parts of the various lakes are considered part of the jurisdictions of other states, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New York, as well as Canada.
The water crisis in Michigan first gained notoriety when it was discovered that cost cutting measures that led to unsafe levels of lead in drinking water in the city of Flint.
Concerns about unsafe water have spread to other parts of the state as well. The Detroit Free Press reported last week that drinking water was cut off in Detroit public schools out of concern about safe drinking levels, forcing school children drink from water coolers and bottled water.
