Gov. Rick Snyder said Tuesday the latest testing of lead levels in Flint tap water is encouraging.
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State officials are boosting the amount of corrosion control chemicals known as phosphates in the drinking water so that a new protective coating will be built up in the pipes to prevent lead from entering the water.
The switch from Detroit water to the Flint River occurred in 2014 under Earley’s direction.
An EPA scientist named Miguel Del Toral wrote an alarming memo in June 2015 warning that Flint’s failure to treat its drinking water correctly had resulted in high lead levels in the city’s water.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who will testify on Thursday, said in a Washington Post editorial on Monday that the state was “dismissive, misleading and unresponsive” with federal officials. Former Mayor Dayne Walling and former emergency manager Darnell Earley, who were in their positions when the tainted water crisis began, were scheduled to appear at the hearing.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said there was “unusual deference on the part of federal officials”, and she was surprised that the federal government didn’t speak up publicly about the crisis.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the oversight panel, said what happened in Flint “cannot ever happen again”.
“I don’t think anyone did anything wrong, but I do think we could’ve done more”, Hedman admitted while pressed on her agency’s role in the crisis.
A memo obtained by the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee revealed that Environmental Protection Agency officials were hesitant to resolving the Flint Water crisis via the use of federal funds.
“I believe that I have been unjustly persecuted, vilified and smeared both personally and professionally in the media and by some local state and federal officials, as well as a misinformed public”, Earley said during his congressional testimony. Elevated levels of lead have been found in children’s blood, with lead contamination linked to learning disabilities and other problems.
Earley says he and other Flint leaders “were all totally dependent” on the expert analysis.
Darnell Earley, a former state-appointed emergency manager in Flint, also was criticized for failing to ask enough questions about the safety protocols in place at the time of the city’s water-source switch.
He also said, “It would have been unreasonable … to reject their guidance and attempt to make independent rulings on a highly sophisticated and scientific subject matter”, but added that in hindsight he should have done more to push back at those experts who claimed the issues were harmless. Headman said she resigned because she was the head of the office and “it was the right thing to do”. “And I don’t know exactly what it is, but there are problems”, he said.
And the disbelief at the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency was bipartisan.
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“We are in mid-March 2016 and you don’t get it and you still don’t get it and neither does the EPA administrator”. “Flint residents have fought so hard, our families have endured so much, we simply deserve the same safety and opportunities for our families and children in Flint as anywhere in America”, said Walling. “The EPA had everything to do with Flint”.
