The drinking water in Flint became tainted in 2014 when the city, under control of a governor-appointed emergency manager, switched its water supply from Lake Huron water treated in Detroit to water from the Flint River.
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“The Flint water crisis is a story of government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction, and environmental injustice”, reads the report released today by the independent Flint Water Crisis investigative panel.
The federal government is providing up to $15 million to temporarily hire 400 Flint residents to aid with recovery from the city’s water crisis and to train people for permanent employment in other fields. Whatever weaknesses that exist in the LCR were used by MI officials to consciously cover up the lead levels and “have their way with Flint’s children”, in the words of Virginia Tech University professor Marc Edwards, an expert on lead in water.
Snyder on Monday said plan for Flint deals with short- and long-term issues.
Given the combined failings of the MDEQ and emergency managers, both of which report to the governor, the report places primary accountability on state government, which means, “Ultimate accountability for MI executive branch decisions rests with the Governor”. At the same time, they have been working on longer-term plans that address Flint’s future prosperity.
“Ms. Hedman said the EPA had nothing to do with creating Flint, (but) the EPA had everything to do with creating Flint”, Edwards said, telling the committee that a “common landlord” who acted the way the EPA acted would have been prosecuted for allowing residents to be exposed to such high levels of lead.
In a statement, Gov. Snyder said a number of recommendations in the report, including increased information sharing among state agencies and an openness to outside research, are already being implemented. “But now that there’s a water crisis unfolding in Flint, Michigan, they’ve decided that what we actually need is more rules”. “The city switched back to its original source late a year ago, but the water remains unsafe”. “Simply replacing all those … private lead services lines is about a $55 million equation, simply providing … phosphorus treatment to the river water was about $100 a day”, he says.
The Pure Ionic system Tao Group will sponsor will not only use its patented technology to clean out the lead, but will also remove all of the pharmaceuticals and estrogens complicit with most municipal water supplies.
Noting that 57 percent of Flint’s population is black and that the city is extremely impoverished, the task force stated that residents “did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities”.
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Dr. Mohammed Saleem, a board certified pediatrician, told the audience of the many global calls he received from people wanting to help and send water to America. Sheriff Robert Pickell said without state aid, county employees might have to be laid off. “When issues impact the city, they also impact the university, and it’s our role as leaders to step up and do what we can to ensure that the city recovers as quickly as possible”, Chancellor Susan E. Borrego said. Susan Hedman, a top EPA official who resigned over the Flint situation, said in a hearing earlier last week, “I don’t think anyone at the EPA did anything wrong, but I do believe we could have done more”.
