Snyder placed part of the blame for the Flint water crisis on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the state’s water regulator, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before issuing a directive to all state departments – that similar situations in the future be brought to his desk immediately, without excuse.
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“If I was a parent in Flint, I’d be beside myself over my kids’ health”, Obama said during his talk, according to CNN.
“We can’t tolerate increased lead levels in any event, but it’s really the city’s water system that needs to deal with hit”.
The goal is to ensure each Flint home has a water filter and supplies, the release says.
Snyder’s chief of staff also said he feared the issue had become a political football being used by the “against everything group”. Snyder said the emergency-funding request for Flint would not be the last, citing the need to upgrade the state’s aging infrastructure. The emails released Wednesday don’t definitively answer that question, but suggest it was probably sometime around September. He called the release of the messages – which are exempt from Michigan’s public-records law – “unprecedented” but necessary so people “know the truth”.
The Scottish director on Thursday told The Hollywood Reporter he first heard about the water contamination crisis while screening the sequel to his 2012 Donald Trump exposé You’ve Been Trumped at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival last summer. Word of other problems with Flint’s water hit Snyder’s inbox in 2014.
President Barack Obama expressed anger on Wednesday at a high-profile health scare in Flint, Michigan, where lead-tainted water is believed to have sickened residents.
The community about 75 miles north of Detroit, has about 100,000 residents, with about 40 percent of them living below the poverty line. That month, a top Snyder aide expressed concern that local residents’ water woes weren’t being taken seriously.
High levels of lead have been detected in the impoverished city’s water since officials switched from the Detroit municipal system and began drawing from the Flint River as a cost-saving measure in April 2014.
Snyder released emails sent to him or by him.
“We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water”.
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“This is the kind of disaster, the kind of failure to deliver basic services that hurts people’s trust in government”, state House Minority Leader Tim Greimel said. “And then you have to buy water on top of it. For those living in a low-income area, it’s just awful”, said Rev. Bobby Jackson of “Mission of Hope”, an organization that’s handing out bottled water to Flint residents. He has previously apologized for regulatory failures and for an underwhelming initial response and on Tuesday outlined a timeline of the “catastrophe” dating to 2013, and blamed it on failures at the federal, state and local level.
