(Jake May/The Flint Journal-MLive.com via AP).
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The water coolers were introduced after Flint officials warned residents about elevated levels of a disinfection byproduct called trihalomethane in the city’s water. “It could be the way the samples were collected”. “Many of us believe that what went down in Flint should cause someone to have a rap sheet”. It’s “very personal when, in fact, you’re trying to get drinking water or cook or bathe and the water looks like that”.
But one of the biggest domestic issues – Flint’s water crisis – got little attention during the Fox News debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Because when you are dismissive of people’s legitimate complaints, that should raise red flags”, she said.
Republicans haven’t had much to say about the contamination of Flint’s water and its citizens with lead, caused when corrosion controls weren’t added to water drawn from the Flint River. The water supply became contaminated when the city, under emergency state management, switched from the Detroit municipal water system and began drawing from the Flint River in April 2014 to save money.
This left MI children with high levels of lead in their blood.
Liam Briones sleeps in a auto seat as his father drives around from fire station to fire station gathering water for the week as it stacks around him in the back seat of the vehicle in downtown Flint on Thursday. “I’ve spent years trying to even the odds for people who have them stacked against them”.
Lyons said the city will send the $5,000, combined with whatever donations they receive from Evanston businesses or citizens, next week. “The system is still recovering”.
Emails released by a liberal group critical of Snyder show the state was sending bottled water a year ago to state employees in Flint.
It is the second round of state funding allocated since the lead contamination was confirmed in the fall. The Republican governor said the funding will provide immediate resources in Flint, but is not the end of state assistance.
Snyder was reviewing the Senate proposal but is “always grateful for support from our federal partners”, Murray said.
But the state opted for a different approach for employees in the Flint State Office Building. On Friday, Snyder said that both the federal EPA and state Department of Environmental Quality “missed it”.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Friday urged Gov. Rick Snyder and MI lawmakers to tap the state’s $1 billion in surplus revenue to create a fund for the long-term health and educational needs of Flint children exposed to potential lead poisoning through the city’s water.
Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan, said it appears the state was not as slow as initially thought in responding to the Flint drinking water crisis.
As governor, Snyder “takes the well-being of all Michiganders very seriously, regardless of where they are from”, spokesman Dave Murray said.
The water coolers were to be installed next to the drinking fountains so that state workers could “chose which water to drink”.
Instead, he said he was focused on a “short-term” fix to address the problem, which involved using phosphates to coat the corroded pipes and prevent lead from leaching into the water.
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It wasn’t until September, after Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha – a pediatrician at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center – and others raised alarms, that officials began to acknowledge that not was there iron in the city’s tap water, but also alarming amounts of lead.
