Emails between high-ranking MI state officials show they knew about an uptick in Legionnaires’ disease and that it could be linked to problems with Flint water long before Governor Rick Snyder said he got information on the outbreak.
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In a March 2015 email obtained by the liberal watchdog group Progress Michigan, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s spokesman told Snyder aide Harvey Hollins that more than 40 cases of Legionnaires’ had been reported since the previous April, when Snyder’s administration oversaw Flint’s switch to the Flint River as its water source.
The city’s water supply became contaminated with lead when it switched its source from Detroit to the Flint River in 2014 to save money. “Despite the evidence and the fact that my son had lead poisoning, the city and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality still continued to tell everyone that the water was safe”, Walters said.
According to WNYC, parts of the Garden State are seeing “a higher percentage of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood” than in Flint.
Members of a congressional committee looking into the Flint Water crisis issued a subpoena to the city’s former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley on Thursday requesting that he come to Washington, D.C. for a deposition on February 25th.
But it was another 10 months before Snyder announced the outbreak at a January 2016 press conference, saying he’d just been informed about the surge of Legionnaires’ cases.
Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives and its committees, and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Arizona, decided not to call Snyder to testify during Wednesday’s hearing on Flint’s water crisis.
“If the concerns were determined to be credible, the director was to bring the issue to the attention of the Governor”.
Janet Stout is a Pittsburgh microbiologist and expert on Legionnaires’ disease who has researched links between Legionella bacteria and public water supplies. “The more I read and learn about this, the angrier I get”.
Dr. Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services toured the post and spoke with EPA sample teams about their on-the-ground activities. McLaren Hospital spent more than $300,000 on a water treatment system, banned showers and also turned to bottled water for patients.
On Thursday, state health officials released the latest data.
Non-profit media organization Progress Michigan acquired the internal emails through a public information request.
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“The only way that the people of this state will have faith in the information he provides is if he becomes fully transparent and accountable”, McElroy said.
