Attorney General Bill Schuette sued Veolia and the Texas-based firm Lockwood Andrews and Newnam (LAN) on Wednesday, saying the firms hired by the city before and after it switched its water to the Flint River in April 2014 caused the water crisis to “occur, continue and worsen”.
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Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced a civil lawsuit in the Flint Water Crisis.
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Flint’s supply was switched from Detroit water to the Flint River as a cost-cutting measure in 2014, but the water was not properly treated and that resulted in the corrosion of lead pipes and elevated lead levels in several of hte city’s children.
Veolia, a French multinational corporation with USA offices, faces the same allegations along with a fraud count.
Health officials say filtered Flint tap water is now safe enough for children and pregnant women to drink.
“There’s no way that Veolia can rewrite history and say they didn’t know and had no reason to know about lead in people’s homes”, Mr. Hall, an environmental and water law expert who teaches at Wayne State University, said at a press conference Wednesday at the University of Michigan-Flint.
“In Flint, Veolia and LAN were hired to do a job and failed miserably”, Schuette said in a statement. Schuette said in a news release that the firms’ “fraudulent and unsafe recommendations made a bad situation worse”.
“The company is disappointed that the Attorney General has taken this action and will vigorously defend itself against these unwarranted allegations of wrongdoing”.
Previously observers and participants in the governor’s task force urged state officials to listen more closely to residents’ concerns.
Paris-based Veolia said Schuette’s office did not contact the company about its work and that its contract was unrelated to the current lead problem.
The EPA, in coordination with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, completed testing of water filters in Flint and found that the filters distributed by the State of MI effectively remove lead or reduce it to levels well below EPA’s action level of 15 parts per billion (ppb).
Thousands were sickened before Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency.
The corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, joints and fixtures. There also were earlier E. coli detections; resident complaints about color, odor and taste; and high levels of a disinfectant byproduct.
In 2011, then Flint Mayor Dayne Walling commissioned LAN to conduct a feasibility study to see whether the city could use the Flint River as a water source and treat the water locally through a city water treatment plant. Mark Durno, an EPA supervisory engineer and “on-scene coordinator” for the Flint water crisis, explained recent testing, requested by the Centers for Disease Control, led to the new declaration.
The attorney general’s lawsuit comes after he announced in April felony criminal charges against two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials and a City of Flint official. It responded to questions about medical problems reported by residents by stating some people might be sensitive to any water, the suit alleges. The upgrades did not include a corrosion control program for the pipes, according to the suit.
Schuette says that more charges, both criminal and civil, are likely. Special Counsel Todd Flood acknowledged difficulty obtaining documents and other information from agencies, including the governor’s office, but he pledged to go to court to get them if needed.
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The Attorney General said there needs to be a victims compensation fund and that damages could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
