In it, he’s expected to ask for $30 million to assist Flint residents pay for water they can’t trust to drink.
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The parents of a 2-year-old Flint, Michigan, girl sued the city and state on Monday over high levels of lead in the child’s blood, accusing officials of callous and deliberate indifference over contaminated water. A blood lead level above five is considered toxic.
At a press conference after the lawsuit was filed, Waid said that a Women, Infants and Children program official told him that his daughter had elevated lead levels in about August 2014 and the family spent thousands of dollars on home repairs believing it was due to lead paint.
Waid and his partner Michelle Rodriguez never suspected the problem was the water, which they had tested when they bought their home, Waid told NBC news. On the other hand, they are furious at officials who made risky changes to the water system and didn’t react promptly when concerns about water quality were raised.
(CNN) – In the midst of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has declined an invitation to testify at a hearing Wednesday before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee about children affected by lead in the water.
The state chose to temporarily switch Flint’s water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure until a new supply line to Lake Huron was ready.
“The people of Flint deserve timely action on emergency efforts to help the city move toward recovery”, Snyder said. Rates of lead poisoning-which can impair brain development and cause other serious health ailments-among the area’s children have skyrocketed, from 5 percent before the water turned bad to 16 percent today.
The first hearing concluded that the Flint’s water crisis points to a failure at “every level of government” and that the response was slow despite warnings of contamination long before residents were informed.
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Flint, with about 100,000 residents, was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched the source of its water. Yet state, local and federal officials did nothing.
