Flint’s toxic water transformed two years ago, when Snyder switched the city’s drinking water source to the Flint River. Glasgow said he met with Michigan Department of Environmental Quality district engineer Mike Prysby shortly before the switchover in April 2014.
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In a series of emails earlier this year, environmental quality department spokespeople said the state hadn’t required Flint to upgrade its corrosion control equipment because upgrades of its corrosion control equipment weren’t required.
Flint’s water has been contaminated by lead leaching from old pipes, the result of a lack of corrosion control when the city was tapping the Flint River.
Prysby has declined previous interview requests from The Associated Press.
Glasgow told AP on Tuesday he was dumbfounded by the regulator’s comments, because, as far he knew, treating water with phosphates was routine.
Snyder plans to blame bureaucrats that “created a culture” valuing technical compliance over all else, to the detriment of Flint residents, who eventually had to suffer with lead-tainted water.
That one meeting was the difference between this city being poisoned and not being poisoned.
Fortune said that when called to testify before a congressional committee on March 17, “Snyder, who touted his competence in his gubernatorial campaign, labeled the experience the “most humbling” of his life – then attempted to shift blame”, by blasting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its “dumb and dangerous” Lead and Copper Rule.
“You can believe I will question some of the decisions of regulators above me in the future”, Glasgow said during a meeting of the Joint Select Committee on The Flint Water Public Health Emergency on the campus of the University of Michigan-Flint campus, according to the News.
The wealth-promoting publication asked its readers to rank Snyder among 18 other corporate and government leaders to see which one is the most disappointing of them all.
After a Virginia Tech professor and a local doctor went public with their findings that Flint’s water had high lead readings, the city was returned to the Detroit system last October. Snyder has apologized for the state’s failings but has rejected critics’ demands to resign, which numerous Flint residents echoed during Tuesday’s hearing.
“I kick myself every day”, Glasgow said.
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“I’m begging you – help us”, a weeping Barbie Biggs said.
