Gov. Rick Snyder is pledging that officials will make contact with every household in Flint to check if residents have a filter and bottled water during the city’s drinking water crisis. It’s another step to address the lead contamination crisis in Flint as Governor Rick Snyder faced a growing crescendo of criticism over the weekend on the state’s handling of the crisis.
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Flint Water Study: New FOIA Shows MDEQ Still Mostly To Blame For Water Crisis and Poor Response – “What is also increasingly clear, is that these same MDEQ employees further abused their power and trust, to derail other well-intentioned attempts by state officials to intervene and protect Flint Residents”. The state helped pay to return Flint to the Detroit water system and for filters.
The city switched the water supply back to Detroit in October, and began treating the pipes; however, “a manmade disaster” as Flint’s mayor Karen Weaver calls it, occurred long before that.
But in August, a group of skeptical researchers from Virginia Tech came up and did in-home testing and found elevated levels of lead in the drinking water and made those findings public.
U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint, sent letters about the crisis Monday to President Barack Obama and to Snyder and said the state’s response has been inadeqauate.
According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality wasn’t treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, in violation of federal law.
Some medical professionals expressed concerns Monday about a state Department of Health and Human Services recommendation that children can be bathed in Flint tap water.
Through the power of social media, the local leaders involved in this effort are seeking to expand participation by encouraging other church organizations to join the effort, Howell said. Residents, and particularly children, are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health. In April 2014, the city switched to getting its water from the Flint River. (Sara Wurfel stepped down to take a private-sector job in November 2015.) Brad Wurfel said in July 2015 that “anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax”.
“We know that we have kids that have been impacted by this, impacted in a negative way”, she said.
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Panelist Helene Cooper of the New York Times said water is “so basic” that the Flint catastrophe “really feeds to this distrust people have”. That’s unconscionable, and I applaud the Department of Justice for joining the Environmental Protection Agency in investigating what happened here.
