Madonna Matches Jimmy Fallon’s $10K Donation for Flint, Michigan

State officials disconnected Flint from Detroit’s water supply in 2014 and began using the Flint River to save money. They also raised health concerns, reporting rashes, hair loss and other problems.

Creagh says officials are studying whether the city’s pipes are being recoated with enough of a lining of phosphates to keep the lead from leaching. Others, according to news reports, say they were turned away, and found out about the problems in the lead-laden water only recently because of language barriers.

“Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if almost 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line?”

The suit is filed by the Concerned Pastors for Social Action, Flint resident and water activist Melissa Mays, the Michigan ACLU and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. The city’s population of 100,000, including especially vulnerable children, has been struggling to get clean water to drink or even bathe with for more than a year.In recent days, a growing number of American pop icons have pledged to help, sending thousands of bottles of water to Flint.

It remains unclear how badly the lead service lines were damaged by the river water.

The Flint water crisis has dominated national headlines for weeks, with everyone from politicians to celebrities criticizing Gov. Rick Snyder and his administration for their handling of the situation.

The more pressing issue, the governor said, is determining whether efforts to recoat existing pipes with proper corrosion controls will produce safer drinking water, now being pulled from Detroit’s system while construction continues on a regional pipeline to Lake Huron.

She announced that Virginia Tech Scientist Mark Edwards has been retained by the city of Flint. For years the state told us we were insane, that our water was safe, which wasn’t true.

“There’s plenty of time to look at what happened and who did what when and where, but right now we have people that don’t have safe drinking water and we’re going to make sure that’s done first”, Meekhof said.

Former Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Todd Flood and retired Detroit FBI chief Andrew Arena were appointed to run the investigation of whether any MI laws were violated in the process that created a public health crisis in Flint.

For months, state officials downplayed reports of lead in the water and a spike in lead levels in the blood of Flint children, before acknowledging a problem on October 1. Snyder said Wednesday that he could not give a date for when the city’s residents would be able to cease their dependence on bottled water.

The Michigan attorney general’s investigation into the process that left Flint’s drinking water tainted with lead is drawing bipartisan criticism, with a Republican leader saying it duplicates the work of a state task force and Democrats questioning whether the special counsel will be impartial.

“We want to highlight our lack of trust in state and federal government to properly address both the short-term crisis of the Flint water poisoning, and Detroit water shutoffs and the long-term effects and solutions”, Wedes said.