A newly released email shows that shortly before Flint began drawing its drinking water from the Flint River, an official with the city water plant feared things were moving too quickly.
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The governor releases more than 21,000 pages of emails from his office this morning, the same day he agrees to testify in Washington D.C.
The requested Medicaid waiver from CMS would help deal with the Flint water crisis, in which residents have been affected by lead poisoning after a state-hired emergency manager switched the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River without following advice for pretreating the water. But, water of the river was corrosive which caused lead to seep into old pipes.
“Contrary to Governor Snyder’s recent claim that he requested this ‘opportunity to testify, ‘ the reality is that he is finally bowing to mounting public pressure to answer questions before Congress about the central and critical role his administration played in this man-made disaster”, Cummings wrote.
“The people of Flint have suffered because they were failed by all levels of government, and so it is understandable that there are questions at all levels of government”, he said in a statement.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who has apologized for the state’s poor handling of the water crisis, alerted the public to the outbreak on January 13 and said he had only heard about it two days earlier.
In fact, the state says nobody knows if miscarriages increased while women in Flint drank the contaminated water because statistics are not available yet. The state signed off on the switch despite the warning. No date for the listening to has been set, however a committee spokeswoman stated the session is probably going subsequent month.
Chaffetz also said he invited EPA manager Miguel Del Toral, who almost a year ago recognized the potential danger posed by high lead levels reported by a Flint resident to the agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago, and Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who took a team to Flint to sample residents’ taps and found numerous homes with high lead levels.
U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha will be on-hand Friday at Hurley Children’s Clinic when New York-based Children’s Health Fund deploys one of the vehicles in its fleet of mobile clinics.
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The call for a federal investigation comes roughly three weeks after Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, announced the state was launching an investigation of its own into the crisis. After that, he said, there more cases of Legionnaires’ in the summer of 2015, four of them fatal.
