Veolia was hired in February 2015 by the city to address drinking water quality and produced at least one report and one public presentation stating the city’s water was safe to drink, according to the lawsuit. LAN is based in Houston, Texas. (LAN) is accused of negligence and public nuisance.
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The Leo A. Daly Co. of Nebraska owns LAN. The official report from the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, commissioned by the Governor’s office and completed after dozens of interviews, contained no reference to Veolia and assigned the company no blame or responsibility for the current crisis.
“This is an important step forward for providing a stable water system for the City of Flint”, Tom Burke, head of the EPA’s research office, said in a statement.
Flint’s drinking water was switched from a Detroit system to the Flint River in 2014, but the supply was not properly treated, resulting in corrosion of lead pipes and elevated lead levels in some children.Schuette announced the start of his investigation into the Flint water crisis on January 15. “We’ve seen with the Flint water crisis that emergency management doesn’t work, and that fiscal austerity policies don’t work”. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
Flint used the Flint River for 18 months, but lead leached from old pipes at homes because the water wasn’t treated to control corrosion. A General Motors plant had stopped using the water just six months after the 2014 switch because it was rusting engine parts, and experts suspect a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak was tied to the water. The switch from Lake Huron water to Flint River water occurred on April 25, 2014. The decision to not add corrosion controls was made by the city and state regulators, not LAN, according to the company, which said it had regularly pushed for corrosion control.
The city has also been putting in additives that rescale the city’s lead pipes, whose corrosion caused the lead contamination. They’ve been told before that their water was safe to drink when it wasn’t.
“People using filtered water instead of bottled water can relieve a significant burden on themselves because they don’t have to deal with transporting and storing it”, Snyder said. “Their fraudulent and unsafe recommendations made a bad situation worse”, Schuette said in a statement. In April, his office criminally charged two state Department of Environmental Quality employees and a Flint water employee.
“These charges are only the beginning, and there will be more to come, that I can guarantee”, Schuette said at the time.
In an email to The Two-Way, a LAN spokesman says that Schuette “blatantly mischaracterized the role of LAN’s service in Flint”.
LAN also recommended treating the water with additional ferric chloride, the suit says.
Veolia did not immediately respond to news of the lawsuit.
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Noah Hall, a special assistant attorney general on Schuette’s investigatory team, said the investigators “can’t get the lead out of kids’ blood”. But he adds: “Unlike the individual plaintiffs, who can cover claims for their personal injury and the damage to their property, for the loss of their livelihood, the state of Michigan – and only the state of Michigan – can recover damages to the cost that the crisis has imposed, and continues to impose, on the state of Michigan”. Lurie has led federal support efforts for the Flint crisis.
