Pierce: Stay Classy: Flint Residents Are Still Being Billed for That Poisonous Water

[cali]

And before I post the article, more news from Michigan about this: Snyder has mobilized the National Guard to go door to door distributing water. I'll also post some other links to pertinent stories about this disgraceful story.

The case against block-granting the federal safety-net programs back to the states—a.k.a., the only "anti-poverty program" the Republicans have—gets stronger by the day. May we approach, Your Honor?

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Exhibit B:

At a press conference, Snyder was repeatedly questioned about the state's admitted mishandling of the water emergency and whether he knew it was a major problem before he addressed it in a press conference in early October. "I have a degree of responsibility," he said. It wasn't until last week that Snyder declared a state of emergency in Flint, where the first batch of 2,200 blood tests turned up 43 children with elevated lead in their blood—which can cause mental and physical development problems. Only 2 percent of the city's population has been tested, even though the state's chief medical officer said every child under the age of 6 years should be assessed. Officials warned Monday that the tap water still isn't safe to drink, but it took five days after the emergency declaration for the state to start handing out bottled water. And Flint's economically challenged citizens are still being billed for water that authorities say they shouldn't consume or even use to brush their teeth.

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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a41152/flint-michigan-water/


Michigan Knew Last Year That Flint’s Water Might Be Poisoned But Decided Not to Tell Anyone

Michigan governor Rick Snyder declared last week that the poisonously high levels of lead in drinking water in Flint, Michigan constitute a state of emergency. "The health and welfare of Flint residents is a top priority and we’re committed to a coordinated approach with resources from state agencies to address all aspects of this situation," Snyder said. Reporting by Michigan Radio and research by the ACLU, though, alleges that the state government itself may have broken laws last year to cover up evidence of high lead levels that were turned up in tests it was supervising.

To recap the situation briefly: Flint has been run since 2011 by emergency managers appointed by Snyder. In 2014, to save money, the city began using the polluted Flint River as its water source. The drinking water from this new source created a number of health threats, including high levels of lead. (Lead can leech into drinking water from lead pipes.) A study released in September 2015 concluded that the change has put Flint children at significantly increased risk of lead poisoning. The city has now switched back to its old water supply, but lead levels are still high, and the state government is distributing bottled water to residents.
Research by the ACLU and Michigan Radio, meanwhile, seems to show that the state's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) rigged water test results in the summer of 2015—when many reports about problems with Flint's water had already been published—to hide evidence of abnormally high lead levels. Both the ACLU and Michigan Radio cite the work of Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech engineering professor who has studied the situation in Flint closely. Per Edwards, Flint city officials broke federal laws by failing to collect water samples from homes that were at the highest risk of lead contaminiation and failed to conduct followup tests as required on homes whose samples showed high levels. And the state DEQ officials who were supervising the city's collection process and testing the samples, Edwards says, made a very unusual move to reject two samples collected by the city—samples that, as it happens, would have pushed the test results above a level at which the city was required to alert residents about contamination. Moreover, the state DEQ notified the city on June 25, 2015—before the city had collected all its samples—that tests on the samples that had been collected appeared to show irregularly high lead levels. After this warning, the city collected another 30 samples. According to the ACLU and Edwards, none of these 30 samples collected after the warning showed irregularly high lead levels. Quite a coincidence!

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http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/01/11/state_of_michigan_flint_broke_law_and_covered_up_lead_levels_in_water_expert.html


http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/01/amid_drinking_water_crisis_in.html

What Did the Governor Know About Flint's Water, and When Did He Know It?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/what-did-the-governor-know-about-flints-water-and-when-did-he-know-it/423342/

[Vinca]

1. I was stunned to hear the price of the water before this fiasco and I can't imagine

getting a bill to help pay for poisoning the population. Please tell me there are lawyers lining up on every street corner in Flint to sue the asses off anyone and any agency involved.

[cali]

2. I hope so. This is obscene.