An effort involving the beer industry in MI to provide extra nutrition support to help Flint families amid the city’s crisis with lead-tainted water is kicking off this week.
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Veolia is also alleged to have committed fraud for making false and misleading statements regarding the safety of Flint’s drinking water.
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.
The state of MI alleges that two water services and engineering companies, Veolia and Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam (LAN), were negligent in their oversight of Flint’s water pipe infrastructure.
“In Flint, Veolia and LAN were hired to do a job and failed miserably”, Schuette tells reporters.
Flint’s water has been in trouble since 2014 when the state switched the city’s source to the Flint River. “They made it worse, that’s what they did”, Schuette said. It noted that a task force appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder largely blamed the state for the emergency and did not even mention the company or assign it any blame.
However, his contention about LAN is corroborated by an August 2015 email by Howard Croft, then Flint’s public works director, which said the decision not to use corrosion control was “addressed and discussed with the engineering firm and with the DEQ” before the city water plant went into full-time service. “The company stands by the analysis provided to Flint under a limited scope in February 2015 and will defend itself against unwarranted allegations of wrongdoing levied while the Governor’s own task force largely assigned the blame on the state of MI itself”. The government only began taking action last fall, after Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards found dangerously high lead levels in the city’s water.
LAN developed a treatment plan for the Flint River that included corrosion control, but did not object when the state DEQ said the corrosion control wasn’t necessary, according to Mike Glasgow, Flint’s water quality supervisor.
Schuette said the damages could be used to set up a trust fund to help Flint residents recover from the water crisis.
But Veolia contends their contract with the city had no relation to the present lead problem and said their testing involved an analysis of residual products, “total trihalomethanes/TTHMs, discoloration, and taste-and-odor issues” caused by the city’s disinfectant process, mlive reports.
In a statement, LAN said it “was not hired to operate the water plant and had no responsibility for water quality”.
Todd Flood is the special assistant attorney general in charge of the investigation. Schuette says that he is expecting to file further criminal charges “soon”.
It said it will defend itself against “these unwarranted allegations of wrongdoing”.
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The attorney general alleges that Veolia’s report on the city’s water in March 2015 made no reference to potential lead contamination.
