And it’s up to Governor Snyder and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to right that wrong.
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FILE – Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder speaks in Detroit.
Months later, Gov. Snyder chose to switch the water supply from the Flint River back to Lake Huron in October.
Lawyers have now filed three suits on behalf of Flint, Michigan residents, one each against the federal, state and city governments, attorney Bill Goodman said Tuesday.
Now more than 180,000 bottles of water are being shipped to Flint courtesy of Cher and water company Icelandic Glacial, which pledged to double her donation.
“We’re going to keep working on putting solutions in place”, Snyder told the News.
Pitt said state officials made “false assurances”, claiming the water was safe. As a result, lead leached from pipes and fixtures into the drinking water.
“More has to be done and we have to reach out in every possible direction”, Goodman said.
Federal prosecutors are already probing the debacle and the state’s health department has just started investigating whether an increase of Legionnaires’ disease cases – seven of them fatal – could be linked to the water.
Experts say that water treatment would have prevented 90% of the problems with Flint’s water.
“It makes you feel awful”, Snyder told Ron Fournier of the National Journal, who published a transcript of his interview with Snyder. On Saturday, President Obama signed an emergency declaration but denied Snyder’s request for a disaster declaration based on the legal requirement that such relief is intended for natural events, fires, floods or explosions. “We are going to demand them as a part of discovery”. He is also considering whether to release emails related to the crisis, which began when Flint, about an hour’s drive from Detroit, switched its water source in 2014 to save money.
During Sunday night’s Democratic debate, Clinton used her closing statement to say that she “spent a lot of time last week being outraged by what’s happening in Flint”. “We know we’re not using that much, but they know … we have to pay what they send us”.
Even though protesters have repeatedly called for him to resign, he has resisted.
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“The comments came Monday, nearly a week after it was reported that EPA employees knew about the potential for lead contamination in the city’s water months before medical professionals found elevated levels in children’s bloodstreams”.
