Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, directed his line of questioning at Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder.
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But the governor said the EPA had failed to alert the public when one of its own experts raised the alarm about lead levels in Flint water.
Asked several times by members of the committee whether he will resign, Snyder said: “My commitment is to fix the problem”.
Representative Matt Cartwright, Democrat from Pennsylvania, said Mr Snyder should resign over the crisis. Quickly getting fed up, Rep. Cartwright made it clear that he is over Gov. Snyder’s “phony apologies”, reminding the Governor he was not in a “medically induced coma for a year” and well aware of his actions. On Thursday, those calls came from federal lawmakers.
Mr Snyder pushed back when US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Gina McCarthy sought to downplay her agency’s role in the crisis. The EPA was “strong-armed” and “misled”, which kept the agency from effectively administering the Clean Water Act in Flint, she added. “By standing up for health and democracy in Flint, they are standing up for us all”.
During a particularly tense exchange between Chaffetz and McCarthy, the committee chair grew frustrated with McCarthy, saying that she had the ultimate power to do something about Flint. Cummings pointed out that some of Snyder’s top staff (15 of whom, the congressman noted, have refused to talk to the committee) already knew about it.
In remarks he is planning to deliver Thursday, Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a longtime EPA critic, says that “if the EPA doesn’t know when to step in and ensure a community has safe drinking water, I’m not sure why it exists at all”.
McCarthy, in her statement, responded: “From day one, the state (Michigan) provided our regional office with confusing, incomplete and incorrect information”.
The emails detail the EPA’s efforts to work with the state Department of Environmental Quality and the city as the crisis mushroomed.
Flint’s lead problems began in April 2014 when a Snyder-appointed emergency manager switched the city’s water supply from Detroit – sourced from the Great Lakes – to Flint River, historically a highly polluted industrial dumping ground.
Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards tells the news website InsideSources that residents in the nation’s capital have been exposed to drinking water with higher levels of lead for a longer period of time than residents in the embattled MI city. “That’s the challenge that I’m facing”, McCarthy said. It wasn’t until October 1, 2015, nearly 18 months after the city started taking its water from the Flint, that Snyder said he learned the water was contaminated.
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In a rhetorical fashion common in Congressional hearings, Cummings likened Snyder to a white collar criminal and suggested that if had failed a company as he failed the people of Flint “he would be hauled up on criminal charges”.
