Snyder creates panel to respond to Flint lead crisis

The city returned to Detroit water last October. As Michigan Radio points out, “that’s months after the Snyder administration acknowledged lead contamination of the city’s drinking water in September”.

Residents are being told they can use unfiltered tap water for bathing and washing clothes, but should be using bottled water or filtered water for drinking, tooth brushing, dishwashing and cooking.

Panelist Helene Cooper of the New York Times said water is “so basic” that the Flint catastrophe “really feeds to this distrust people have”.

The state is talking to the federal government about Flint’s lead in water crisis but isn’t ready to request a national disaster declaration, Gov. Rick Snyder said here today. The new water was saltier and corroded old pipes, allowing lead to leach into the system and poison children. The US Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are also investigating the state’s response to the water crisis. Snyder’s office said it had teamed up with local officials to begin providing free bottled water, filters and testing kits at five fire stations around the city. Lead can cause irreversible brain and developmental damage in children and infants who ingest it through water or lead-based paint.

MI officials are stepping up their efforts to address elevated lead levels in Flint’s water after residents accused them of responding too slowly to the crisis.

Flint typically relies on water from Lake Huron, just as Detroit does, but saw its water supply become contaminated while drawing its water from the Flint River between April 2014 and October of previous year. Its director, Dan Wyant, resigned last month. And the state DEQ officials who were supervising the city’s collection process and testing the samples, Edwards says, made a very unusual move to reject two samples collected by the city-samples that, as it happens, would have pushed the test results above a level at which the city was required to alert residents about contamination. The executive order signed Monday forms the Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee.

Snyder wouldn’t specify how much money he might need during a visit to Flint.

Joining MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, and – ahem – Cher, Esquire lead political blogger Charles P. Pierce has weighed in on the Flint water crisis.