Circumventing democracy helped cause Flint water crisis (Your letters)

It was telling that Gov. Rick Snyder was asked to appear at the town hall, but he never responded to Maddow’s invitation.

The lawsuit says the pipes should be replaced at no cost to customers, and also seeks relief for any medical harm suffered.

“I want to announce that we are going to increase both the executive office presence and the presence of the state of MI in the city of Flint”, Snyder said. Without fail, every single person I met with had a horror story to share about the criminally negligent conditions they’ve experienced across the state.

But Young’s Environmental, along with other cleanup contractors, are trying to keep up in the hopes that the bottles don’t end up in city landfills, where they say it takes as many as 450 years for one plastic bottle completely degrade. In other words, not any time soon.

Snyder said the state’s first priority remained getting clean water to Flint.

The water is bad, there’s no doubt about it. We have been told after the boneheaded decision to change the city’s drinking water source from Lake Huron in Detroit to the Flint River, the city’s drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger.

Snyder declared a state of emergency January 5 and called out the National Guard to assist with water and filter distribution January 12. The suit is seeking a ruling to force state officials to fix alleged violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act, including failure to properly treat the water for corrosion, test it for lead and notify residents of results and accurately report if the correct sample sites are being selected. Water is no longer coming from the Flint River, but rather the Detroit water system.

Dennis Pajot/Getty Images Fans bring in donations of bottled water prior to the game between the Flint Firebirds and the Windsor Spitfires on January 21.

Democrats in Michigan’s Republican-controlled Legislature have introduced legislation to repeal an emergency manager law they say contributed to Flint’s lead-tainted water crisis. What we’re struggling with right now is, there’s really no precedent for this kind of man-made disaster. That allowed lead from old pipes to leach into the water. Lead pipes are more commonly found in cities in the Midwest and Northeast, but any city built during that timeframe could potentially face a situation like Flint. “But as a practice now, we should be working on that, very clearly”. We don’t have any grocery stores in Flint. “So simply identifying which homes have the lead pipes is a monumental task”.

The people of Flint, Michigan, need our help. It’s estimated that there could be about 25,000 homes that need new pipes.

Gary Peters (D-Mich.) asserted Thursday that the ultimate responsibility for the crisis lies with the state and its Republican governor, Rick Snyder. She’s been vocal in her opposition of EMs on her show over many months. The city of Flint must be evacuated just like the Love Canal neighborhood was 35 years ago.

You can sign a pledge to support Moore’s plan and promise that you won’t get on Amazon Prime tonight and ship a few crates of Aquafina to Flint.

They’re driving whatever is donated to Flint, Michigan on Saturday. “But local leaders in Flint were not actually at fault because local leaders were replaced in Flint by emergency managers who ran the city on their own say-so and who reported only to the governor and not the voters of the city”. Mayor Weaver said: “Democracy needs to be restored in Flint”. “What has happened to us should never happen to anyone again”.