Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, who lost his re-election bid in November amid the water crisis, said newly released emails by Snyder showed that the governor’s staffers disregarded Flint’s plight because of the city’s demographics.
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The federal government is chipping in $80 million to help alleviate some of the acute distress in Flint, but a long term fix – an overhaul of the pipe systems in the city – could cost between $700 million and $1 billion, if the outdated records system is even navigable enough to modify.
From the outset, people complained about the Flint River water, which had a reddish-brown tinge and a metallic smell and taste. According to a source who has cropped up, “every major United States city east of the Mississippi” is distorting the levels of lead and copper in their drinking water, meaning more places than just Flint could be putting their residents at risk. Late in 2015, testing revealed that the proportion of children with above-average levels of lead in their blood had nearly doubled since the city’s decision to switch to the Flint River.
Previously, the city used Lake Huron water treated by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
Separately, Snyder announced the suspensions of two employees of the state Department of Environmental Quality in connection with regulatory failures that led to the crisis. Equally troubling was the news that officials had failed to use an anticorrosive agent to treat the water, violating federal law.
Asked about the multiple local and national agencies involved in the back-and-forth in recent months over the city’s water, Snyder said: “That’s a huge bureaucratic problem, and that’s part of the problem with culture in government”. That’s 8,657 children, based on Census data. I’ll tell you what: “If the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action”.
Most of the lead poisoning on this map in these areas isn’t from water pipes – it’s from homes with lead paint.
That means testing done today does not represent past exposure. It can cause permanent damage to the brain and other organs, and it’s most unsafe for kids, whose small bodies are still developing, the CDC says.
Snyder on Friday blamed the water crisis on bureaucracy, citing a cultural problem with civil servants more focused on technicalities than common sense.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently approved an emergency declaration, which could bring up to $5 million in direct funding to Flint.
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.
On Wednesday, the pop star was on MSNBC extolling the company’s generosity as the first trucks of the largely obscure brand began off-loading at the unmarked warehouse commandeered by the Michigan State Police to manage supplies.
“The department people weren’t, the heads were not being given the right information by the quote-unquote experts”, he said.
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Appealing President Barack Obama’s refusal to declare a federal disaster in Flint when he declared a federal emergency there on Saturday. It’s no different, he said, than Walmart’s donations of household goods or the mobile laundry facility that Tide deploys after natural disasters.
