“We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water”.
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The Flint River is notorious for containing decades-worth of factory runoff.
Most of the lead poisoning on this map in these areas isn’t from water pipes – it’s from homes with lead paint. According to a source who has cropped up, “every major USA city east of the Mississippi” is distorting the levels of lead and copper in their drinking water, meaning more places than just Flint could be putting their residents at risk.
Flint residents complained loudly and often about the water quality immediately after the switch but were repeatedly told it was safe. Even the newly elected mayor of Flint, Karen Weaver, said she and her husband stopped drinking the tap water nearly two years ago. Anna Heaton, a spokesperson for Gov. Rick Snyder (R), would not offer specifics.
The emails tell the sorry story of the Flint water crisis that has become a subject of anger for President Barack Obama and a topic of debate in the presidential election race to succeed him.
Word that the inspector general will review the EPA’s response to the Flint water crisis comes as the agency has issued an emergency order calling for more action in the city to respond to the high levels of lead found in the water there, and Gina McCarthy, the agency’s head, accepted the resignation of Midwest Region 5 director Susan Hedman in the wake of the public health fiasco. He then chose to switch the water supply from the Flint River back to Lake Huron last October.
Two employees at Michigan’s Environmental Quality Department have been suspended in connection with Flint’s water crisis. He suggests the city needs to provide a credit for residents who have been paying for water during the time that it was known it was toxic, and that there should be a moratorium on shut-off notices “until there is a system-wide certainty the water is safe”.
“As an association, we exist to to help our members first, so we try in a situation like this to collect the information from the event that is going to help them understand it and help them do their jobs better”, Kail said in an interview, adding that the key role it takes in situations like this is helping them work with their customers.
“Damage to the pipe integrity can never be reversed”, Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who helped identify and expose Flint’s lead problem, said in an email.
13 in Flint, Michigan.
“We’re talking birth rates defects, we’re talking sterility stuff like that, and that’s what really bothers me”, he said. About 120 kilometres north of Detroit, Flint has about 100,000 residents, of which 41 per cent live below the poverty line compared with state and national rates of 17 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively.
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The crisis has created a ideal storm to strip their houses of their remaining value, they say.
