The EPA’s former regional director, Susan Hedman, who resigned after criticism of her handling of the crisis, will also be among those testifying on Tuesday.
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“And while I used the threat of enforcement action to motivate the state and city to move forward, we found that the enforcement options available to us were of limited utility last fall, due to the unique circumstances of this case”, Ms Hedman told the congressional committee. “I’m not a water treatment expert”, he said.
“Had a landlord acted toward their tenants like the EPA has acted toward the citizens of Flint”, Edwards said, “the EPA would have acted quickly to sue them”. “I guess being a government agency means you never have to say your sorry”.
Flint’s money-saving decision to switch to improperly treated water from the Flint River in April 2014, instead of using Detroit’s water system, has been blamed for the ongoing crisis that left residents’ water unsafe to drink.
Almost 9,000 children younger than 6, the most vulnerable population, were exposed. It was 11 months after first seeing elevated lead levels from a concerned mother, LeeAnne Walters, who had reached out to the EPA after failing to get help from the state.
A MI legislative committee tasked with reviewing findings and taking testimony on the mistakes that led to the lead contamination of Flint’s drinking water is holding its first meeting. Children, pregnant women and people with certain health problems have been told to consume only bottled water, and many others are following that advice.
“What’s sickening about this is it was totally avoidable”.
In order to meet water standards, Edwards said Flint will be required to undergo city-wide water testing in accordance with federal law.
The chairman quoted an internal EPA memo that one enlightened bureaucrat wrote – “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for”, implying the agency knew of the lead levels and made a decision to do nothing. The context of that sentence was not immediately clear at the hearing.
Hedman, who resigned in January in the midst of the controversy, sat on the same congressional panel and delivered an opening statement minutes earlier, saying she was proactive in addressing the Flint water crisis and was wrongfully accused of not doing enough and sitting on the sidelines. “And you messed up people’s lives”, he told Hedman.
“He is a hero”, Hedman said of Del Toral.
But Hedman was not the only official to endure sharp questioning.
For his part, former Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley said he relied on experts from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the EPA to advise him about Flint’s water. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is something wrong with that picture”.
That combination, critics of the law claim, is particularly alarming in a place like Flint or Detroit – overwhelmingly black, Democratic-leaning cities where voter priorities quite likely differ a great deal from those of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), the chief architect and advocate of the state’s emergency manager law. But she insisted that state officials had failed to act on her agency’s urgent concerns.
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“That was one reason for my resignation, but there was another: Quite simply, this tragedy happened on my watch”, she said. The corrosive water lacked adequate treatment and caused lead to leach from old pipes – and there has since been much discussion about who is to blame.
