She says she yelled “How was your water?” In this Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016 photo, Anna Rushing, left, 73, and her sister, Nancy Watson, right, 72, both of Flint, talk about their itchy, red and dry skin symptoms they believe they received from the lead i…
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She explained to the audience what went wrong in Flint and what the city needs to do to provide residents with potable water. “The kits are available free of charge at the water resource sites within Flint fire stations”.
Dr. Nicole Lurie of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the lead level in some Flint locations has exceeded 150 parts per billion, which is the level for which water filters are graded. Public health officials want to test the thousands of children who have drunk and bathed in the water because they may suffer developmental and emotional disabilities associated with high lead levels in the bloodstream.
Residents noticed smelly, discolored, dirty-looking water soon after that, only to get assurances from officials that it was safe to drink. But by then, it was too late: Water pipes around the city and in-and-out of homes had been badly damaged.
Governor Rick Snyder is urging Flint residents to get their water tested. That meant the state was the top decision maker two years later, to shift Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron (via Detroit’s water system) to the Flint River, which Virginia Tech researchers found had water 19 times more corrosive than the previous supply. Flint has reconnected to Detroit’s system for now.
Scientists and engineers say supplying Flint with water uncontaminated by lead and other pollutants won’t be easy.
“If Flint were 57 percent white and not 57 percent black, you wonder whether or not the kind of callous indifference that’s being shown – not just by our state government but by Republican candidates who won’t even speak up for a whole population of 100,000 people who are facing a serious crisis”.
“It’s time to stand up and recognize that things could have been done differently”, Snyder said before signing the aid legislation.
“(People) don’t take the old paint off, (they) just paint over the old stuff”, he said, adding many older varnishes on wood floors also contain lead.
Snyder told WWJ-AM that he had “no knowledge of that taking place”.
AmeriCares, which works globally, has a long history of responding to US emergencies, it said, “including Hurricane Katrina, the Joplin, Mo., tornado, superstorm Sandy and the 2013 Oklahoma tornadoes”.
“There was a failure at the local, state and federal level”, the governor said.
Students brought in gallon jugs and bottles of water for the kids in Flint and fill up the hallways at their school.
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When you’re part of a community where you pay taxes and fees, you expect certain services in exchange, clean drinking water being one of these.
