High levels of lead have been found in blood samples taken from children after the more corrosive water from the river ate away at the city pipes.
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The EPA’s comments come as it is poised to face greater public scrutiny in a hearing before Congress Wednesday morning, over its administration of the Safe Drinking Water Act in Flint, Michigan.
But he says state officials were not the only ones who made mistakes in Flint.
The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a meeting on Wednesday with members of the EPA. Prosecutors from the FBI joined investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit told the Detroit Free Press.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Detroit said in January it was investigating the water crisis with the EPA.
The decision to draw water from a river that had been polluted by decades of industrial waste was made under the authority of Flint’s Emergency Manager Darnell Early – a Democrat.
The EPA’s head of its Midwest region, Susan Hedman, has already quit after she played down the Flint water contamination crisis.
But as The Christian Science Monitor reported Monday, Flint residents are not just waiting to see if government officials will cooperate to bring clean water to the city’s taps.
“What happened in Flint was avoidable and never should have happened”, said Joel Beauvais, acting chief of the EPA’s water office. The water, which was contaminated with lead, also caused rashes and has been linked with diminished academic performance and behavioral issues in children.
The water billing issue was discussed in detail last week by the so-called “Mission Flint” of state department leaders in the Snyder Administration and headed up by top aide Richard Baird. According to Snyder’s office, cited by AP, the to-be-proposed $30 million in Consumption and Consumer Use Credit will cover a two-year period from April 2014 until the spring, when officials hope that the water will be safe for use without filters. He also said, however, that officials in Flint, a poor, predominately black city of 100,000 residents, ignored the advice of their own consultants to take action.
FBI spokeswoman Jill Washburn told the AP in an email that the agency is “investigating the matter to determine if there have been any federal violations”.
Note, Earley was invited to participate in the committee’s hearing, but he was not subpoenaed.
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The EPA announced in November an audit of how MI enforces drinking water rules, and plans to identify ways to possibly strengthen state oversight. That includes the 18-month period during which the city switched its water source while under state financial management until it reconnected to Detroit’s system because of lead contamination blamed on state regulatory failures.
