2 companies sued over Flint water deny blame

Attorney General Bill Schuette sued Veolia and the Texas-based firm Lockwood Andrews and Newnam (LAN) on Wednesday, saying the firms hired by the city before and after it switched its water to the Flint River in April 2014 caused the water crisis to “occur, continue and worsen”.

Veolia is a multinational company. “President Obama drank filtered Flint water and encouraged others to do so”, Gov. Rick Snyder said in response to Thursday’s “People using filtered water instead of bottled water can relieve a significant burden on themselves because they don’t have to deal with transporting and storing it”. “Their fraudulent and risky recommendations made a bad situation worse”.

The lack of corrosion control caused lead to leach from old pipes and fixtures, poisoning the water system. The county will pay for pre-construction engineering, and the state will share the cost of the connection with the city.

Mayor Weaver urged Flint residents to remain diligent in making sure the filters are properly installed and continuously maintained.

The Michigan city of Flint will get water from the Karegnondi Water Authority system as soon as it’s ready, even though the mayor had threatened to break an agreement in the aftermath of its crisis with lead-tainted water. Veolia was hired in 2015 to address the city’s water quality. That was in February 2015. Still, officials said bottled water should be used in formula for infants under 1, and pregnant women and children under 6 were also warned that bottled water was a safer choice.

LAN said the suit was “without merit” and that the attorney general “blatantly mischaracterizes the role of LAN’s service to Flint”.

Back in April, Schuette assured everyone at a press conference in Flint that more criminal charges would be coming.

Jamie-Lee Venable of United Way, chair of the recovery group’s communications subcommittee, said the announcement came as a surprise and voiced irritation that those hard at work in grassroots efforts were not given more notice about the announcement. The official report from the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, commissioned by the Governor’s office and completed after dozens of interviews, contained no reference to Veolia and assigned the company no blame or responsibility for the current crisis.

The Attorney General claims the companies committed professional negligence.

During our one-month consultation, the water produced and provided by Flint met the treatment standards for levels of disinfection byproducts. The companies were also supposed to test Flint River water quality after the state’s Department of Environmental Quality found it in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2014.