Federal officials denied declaring a disaster, which could have brought millions more.
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While much of the blame has been directed at Gov. Rick Snyder and state officials, particularly the Department of Environmental Quality, some have faulted the EPA’s Region 5 office for not acting more forcefully.
Snyder has been under intense scrutiny for his handling of the Flint water crisis. Flint, a poorer, mostly African-American city of 100,000 about an hour north of Detroit, has been run by a state-appointed emergency manager since 2011.
Department of Environmental Quality Director Keith Creagh wrote in a letter Friday to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy that the state will work with her department and city of Flint. That caused lead to leach into the water for a year and a half and contributed to a spike in child lead poisoning before city and state officials fully acknowledged the problem.
State water regulators failed to ensure corrosive water from the Flint River was treated to prevent leaching from lead pipes.
“There are a number of indications that concerns of Flint’s elected leaders and faith and community leaders were being dismissed as political posturing instead of taken seriously as efforts to address very real problems”, said Walling, who is white and was first elected mayor in 2009.
When asked Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” whether the Flint disaster was a case of environmental racism, Snyder said: “Absolutely not”.
The hospital said it installed a secondary water disinfectant system throughout the entire facility at a cost of $300,000 and also installed lead filters on water and ice machines.
This so-called distortion of facts comes by cities using water testing methods that the Environmental Protection Agency have classified as being misleading. On Thursday, Snyder released over 250 pages of documents which he said constituted the totality of his personal correspondence on the Flint water crisis, but Neeley said an email he had written to the governor in January 2015, nine months before the state took action on the issue, warned of “civil unrest” if nothing was done to correct the situation. “We’re focused on fixing the problems and making sure nothing like this happens again in Flint or any other MI city”.
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A top federal regulator resigned this week in connection with the lead contamination. Even though the state has switched Flint back to the Detroit water system, the pipes are so damaged that the water may still not be safe to drink. The advisory group said its recommendations are more detailed and comprehensive than what the EPA ordered, and Snyder said officials would “move as quickly as possible to determine the best way to achieve the results”.
