FBI part of team investigating Flint water contamination

The state says the plan to help ensure drinking water no longer is tainted with lead includes residential water testing, school testing, food service and restaurant provider testing, blood testing and overall testing of Flint’s water distribution system.

The governor called the bill he signed, which his state’s legislature passed unanimously one day earlier, “a step moving toward solving the Flint issue”. The process also is likely to identify so-called hot spots where more costly remediation, including lead pipe replacement all the way to the tap, may be necessary, officials said.

Help – $28 million of it – is on its way to Flint, Michigan. “Flint draws their water from the river, and ours is ground water”.

In light of the attention toward water problems in Flint, the head of South Lyon’s water department said residents can “rest assured” their water is safe. “I’m so proud of our communities working together and it has made a huge difference”, Mayor McDonald said.

While the city’s plan could bring some relief to sections of the city within weeks, there are some big caveats.

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that Flint was a “man-made crisis” and urged Republicans to approve more aid.

“Understandably, residents here are scared”, Dr. Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said at a press conference regarding the filters. But city officials, followed by state officials and then the federal Environmental Protection Agency, shrugged off the complaints.

Some 18 million people depend on the Mississippi River for drinking water. But others have anxious about the impact of chlorine on residents’ health.

“In other words, you have a state official, who was able to suspend city council meetings, able to suspend city ordinances, able to cancel labor contracts, able to basically oversee, overrun – if you will – the fiscal and political civic decisions of a municipality, and as you so well pointed out, while nine percent of MI citizens are under emergency managers, it represents 50 percent of the African-American population and well more than that when we consider citizens of color”, Williams-Brooks said.

Snyder has accepted the responsibility for the emergency while also taking to task state and federal environment regulators.

The FBI is now investigating the contamination of Flint’s drinking water, a man-made public health catastrophe, which has left an unknown number of Flint children and other residents poisoned by lead and resulted in state and federal emergency declarations. The system switched back to Detroit late a year ago.

“The treatment we do coats the pipes to prevent leaching”, he said. Some children in the city tested positive for having lead in their blood, which has been linked to developmental problems, lower IQ and learning disabilities. Water is something that you live on. 160 of those samples were above 15 parts per billion. She said people with levels over 150 ppb were being notified and their water being retested. The state has been distributing free water filters and testing kits door-to-door in the city. But roughly 25,000 parcels have piping of an unknown origin.

An independent panel appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder has determined that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was primarily responsible for the water contamination.