What’s more, nobody is certain how many lead service pipes there are in Flint. The city’s 100,000 residents, including its 9,000 children, were placed at risk.
Advertisement
It turns out that state regulators had failed to require Flint to properly treat the river water, which was more corrosive than the Lake Huron water the city used to pipe in. “You deserve to know that the buck stops here with me”.
Actor Matt Damon told The Daily Beast he thought Governor Rick Snyder should resign because of the Flint water crisis, and went on to call for Snyder to be put on trial.
Also Friday, State Representative Sheldon Neeley accused the Snyder administration of hiding some of the governor’s correspondence on the issue.
Due to a cost-cutting move by a state-appointment emergency manager, the cities water supply has been contaminated with extreme levels of lead.
The Michigan House on Wednesday approved Snyder’s request for $28 million more in the short term to pay for more filters, bottled water, school nurses and testing and monitoring – on top of $10.6 million allocated in the fall.
But there were problems right off the bat: Residents said the water was brown or reddish; it stank; it tasted weird.
The EPA said Susan Hedman, head of the agency’s regional office in Chicago whose jurisdiction includes MI, was stepping down February 1 so the EPA could focus “solely on the restoration of Flint’s drinking water”.
Muchmore also said two state agencies and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could not “find evidence of a major change” in lead levels.
“Some DEQ actions lacked common sense, and that resulted in this awful tragedy in Flint”, Snyder said.
It could take a long time to determine the actual costs of fixing the disaster in this financially struggling city, where more than 40 percent of people live in poverty. What has become clear, however, is that Kansas’ continuing budgetary squeeze and the anti-government, anti-federal assistance stances of state officials have created a series of personal crises for those individuals – the needy, prisoners and the mentally ill – who have the least power to affect policies that directly affect them.
After a 20-year study, sociologist Robert Bullard found “race to be more important than socioeconomic status in predicting the location of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities”. “Rather than invest in the city and help revive its fortunes, the state enacted the most punitive form of austerity”.
President Obama has declared the Flint water crisis a federal emergency. This week, Snyder apologized.
Flint needs immediate help, and it needs to fix its problems in short order.
Advertisement
Indeed, Snyder has been a key ally of Obama in seeking to use the bankruptcy of Detroit to set a precedent for the dismantling of public employee pensions and the hiving off of public assets to speculators such as billionaire Dan Gilbert. As for Flint – a majority Black city in a state that is Republican-dominated and where Blacks are only 14 percent of the state population – they simply do not have any sway in the state capital of Lansing. For three decades, federal law books have swelled with laws and regulations giving the EPA ultimate oversight over the safety of all the country’s drinking water.
