State Delayed Action on Lead in Flint Water: Records

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LANSING, MI – State officials encouraged officials in Flint, where the mayor has asked for federal emergency relief to deal with a public health crisis resulting from high lead levels in water, to understate test results, according to public records.

After the testing revealed dangerous lead levels in June, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality wrongly indicated the water was safe to drink, according to the e-mails, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The records — obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who helped bring the water crisis to the forefront — indicate that state officials encouraged the city of Flint to find water samples with low lead levels and disqualify two samples with high readings.

Related

• Erin Brockovich Keeping an Eye on Flint’s ‘Poop Water’
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The financially struggling city turned off the taps to water from Detroit, which gets its supply from Lake Huron, and switched to water from the Flint River in a money-saving move in 2014. Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager at the time.

The e-mail trail suggests state officials were aware of the impending water crisis well ahead of a study released in September by West Bloomfield pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, pediatric residency director at Flint’s Hurley Children’s Hospital.

The study showed the proportion of children with above-average levels of lead in their blood had doubled had nearly doubled since the city began getting its water from the Flint River.

The consequences of lead poisoning are serious and long lasting.

According to the Free Press report, the e-mails showed that DEQ district coordinator Stephen Busch told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in February that Flint had “an optimized corrosion control program” to prevent lead from getting into the water system when, in fact, the city had no corrosion control program at all.

DEQ spokesman Brad Wurfel declined to tell the Free Press why Busch indicated corrosion control measures were adequate to take care of the problem, why another DEQ official asked for water samples showing low lead levels, or why some of the samples showing higher lead levels were disqualified.

“Most of these questions regard issues presently before the governor’s independent after-action review panel,” Wurfel told the Free Press in an e-mail. “We don’t want to get in front of that review.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the matter, and several families filed a federal lawsuit last month that accuses more than a dozen state and city officials of negligence.

» For more about what the e-mail trail suggests about state officials’ knowledge of the lead crisis, go to the Detroit Free Press.

» Photo via Erin Brockovich Facebook page