FBI joins investigation of Flint water lead contamination

Chaffetz said refusing to attend was not an option, and called on the U.S. Marshals to track him down. “The public has a right to be outraged and it must be fixed”. “Outrage doesn’t even begin to cover it”. As Snyder said, engineers and geologists are still working to get a firm grasp on where Flint’s old pipes actually lie, drawing on 30-year-old maps, handwritten notes, and on-the-ground fieldwork.

Expert advice was dismissed, prompting Michigan’s government to issue an apology to the people of Flint at the hearing for sidelining people who raised concerns over unsafe levels of lead in in the city’s water.

“Especially vulnerable to the high lead levels are a generation of children and babies – American children and babies – not from a different country”.

“Because of Flint, Michigan, most of the world now knows lead in water can poison children”, Pivnick said. The crisis has so far led to the declaration of an emergency in the state.

In November, the EPA announced it was auditing how MI enforces drinking water rules and said it would identify how to strengthen state oversight. “Failure to implement such treatment resulted in leaching of lead into the city’s drinking water”. EPA regional staff urged MDEQ to address the lack of corrosion control, but was met with resistance.

State regulators failed to require water from the Flint River be properly treated, allowing lead from pipes to leach into the supply and causing a public health emergency.

“Flint residents will not have to pay for water they can not drink”, the Republican governor said in a statement to the AP late Tuesday. “That’s ridiculous”, says Flint resident and protestor Melissa Mays.

While Snyder OK’d $28 million in state funds and there’s a bill before the U.S. Congress to provide much more, Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing was not focused on paying to fix Flint’s water crisis.

Aesthetics? A General Motors factory in Flint had to quit using the water because it was corroding metal engine parts, and a hospital quit because the water was damaging its medical instruments! “It’s not the kind of thing we should think of (happening) in America”.

The city of Flint reported a contamination to the state in January 2015, but indicated the threat had been previously resolved. He also called out Darnell Earley, who was Flint’s state-appointed emergency manager between 2013 and 2015.

But Creagh also took a swipe at the feds, complaining that the Environmental Protection Agency “did not display the sense of urgency that the situation demanded”.

So Baird and his team said they wanted to figure out how to grant some kind of relief for those who haven’t paid their bills while offered refunds through discounts on future bills for those whose accounts are current.

“I don’t care whether it’s EPA, whether it’s local, whether it’s state”. Gov. Rick Snyder used a law giving him the power to remove all local government and appoint an emergency administrator, which was done for Flint.

Creagh and Joel Beauvais, acting chief of the EPA’s water office, are among those scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “We’re serious about making sure that the people responsible for this manmade disaster are held accountable”, said Bernadel Jefferson, a bishop. He said efforts to shift blame to the EPA are an unwarranted distraction from what was mostly a decision ultimately made by Snyder’s appointees.

Beauvais said the issue was a “concern” and something that the EPA was starting to look at nationally.