In the middle of the worst health crisis facing the state of Michigan in possibly forever, the EPA has stepped in to make sure Michigan’s leaders are rectifying this situation properly and quickly. So what does the head of the Michigan DEQ do? Publicly challenges the legality of the EPA’s requests. MDEQ Director Keith Creagh says in a letter to EPA Director Gina McCarthy, “To our knowledge, the State has complied with every recent demand made by the USEPA.”
Can this administration get any more boneheaded? The people of Flint are scared and pissed and looking for assurances that someone is effectively working to fix this situation. And-- even on the off chance that the state is correct on the legality-- for the Snyder administration to write this letter smacks of utter tone deafness. Address your concerns over the EPA’s demands in person (as the two agencies are planning to meet face-to-face next week anyway). Why would you go out of your way to *publicly *push back on the federal government *right now? *
Instead of publicly saying “Yes, thank you for your help on this, let’s work together to get this done,” they effectively say “How dare you? We’ve done everything we’re supposed to do.”
Not only does he display an unfathomable lack of knowledge and unpreparedness, he actually seems to get angry that he’s being asked basic questions like “What is the current testing data on Flint’s water?” and “How many children have tested positive for lead in Flint?” Who goes on the national news and doesn’t have basic information like that given to him beforehand?
Then, when asked what went wrong, he claims the people doing the testing were “too technical” and “followed the rules too closely” without using enough “common sense.”
Uh, on the contrary, governor, your people *didn’t *follow the rules, and cherry picked only a few test locations in the parts of Flint that had new pipes in order to keep test results below the federal red line for far too long. *That’s *why this situation dragged on for two years.
Can someone move this thread to the pit, so I say what I really feel about these clowns running Michigan?
I don’t know how dangerous 21 part per billion is, but I know that people won’t stand for it. And I’m sure that people all over the country are having their water tested, or will soon do so.
Perhaps we can get away from the racism discussion and get back to the main topic? Because this may be getting a LOT more interesting.
I’m not totally convinced about the veracity of something called motorcitymuckraker.com, so there could be a lot of spin to this. The actual emails are available as a PDF here:
The Motor City Muckraker, Steve Neavling, is actually a solid journalist. He’s a former reporter for the Detroit Free Press (who got let go after writing about a confrontation he had with now-disgraced Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh), a freelancer for Reuters and occasional writer for Huffington Post.
Fivethirtyeight published a good article on the water crisis today. There’s a lot more detail on the frustrations of residents and some scientists when their concerns were ignored.
Now we know Rick Snyder’s secret identity- it’s Austerity Man!
Some good may come of this- I bet that about every community is going to be testing their water and many miles of lead pipe are going to be removed and replaced. That’s going to put a lot of people to work and in the long run make us all safer. Maybe more research into lead poisoning and perhaps we’ll wind up with better treatments.
Not really. Flint has had six emergency managers in the last 13 years, mostly because the city is being bankrupted by enormous costs that they can’t pay. Much of this is pensions (retired city pensioners outnumber actual employees of the city by something like three to one), and Flint is trying to cut costs in any way they can (and some ways they can’t). Flint is in much the same position as GM was - they promised to pay pensions and benefits to retirees that they cannot afford since the crash.
It doesn’t mean the water thing isn’t a clusterfuck of epic proportions, but the reason the governor appointed the emergency managers was because Flint was already fucked.
If Flint were a rich town, they wouldn’t have been in financial crisis and they wouldn’t have had to switch the water supply.
As for the white and Republican thing - Flint’s first crisis was when Woodrow Stanley was mayor. He is neither white, nor Republican. He was recalled, and the first emergency manager appointed. Then Flint picked Rutherford as their mayor - also not a Republican. Dayne Walling was mayor during the most recent crisis - also not a Republican. (Walling is one of the guys telling everyone that the Flint water was safe).
Much of the problem is that the Flint establishment politicians were fighting tooth and nail against the cost-cutting measures the emergency managers put into place.
Like I said, there is plenty of blame to go around. But the idea that the “white Republicans” decided to fuck over a town because it is just black folks is more than a little exaggerated.
Again, no one is claiming that white Republicans decided to fuck over a black town. The claim is that the response has not had anywhere near the urgency it would have if the town had been white and rich.
I don’t think there is a conscious decision to fuck anyone over. I definitely think that the priority of this is unconsciously set lower because of the residents’ race and lack of wealth.
I think in discussion of racism this aspect of the issue has been ignored or perhaps not noticed. Is there anything to the claim that this wasn’t done to save money, and that in fact Detroit offered them a discount that would have saved them more than switching sources did?
Actually, a great many people are claiming exactly this. Most of them are Hollywood idiots (mainly interested in recreational outrage) or civil-rights leaders (who, let’s be honest, make their living by stirring up racial tensions). But they are certainly out there, and they are most likely making things worse, not better, by sidetracking discussions on how to resolve the problem. For evidence, the NAACP presented its action plan to the governor the other day, and it apparently was mainly concerned with tangential issues like economic development. Which is fine, but can we deal with the problem at hand, please?
True enough, and I should have been more specific. I was talking about the good folks in this thread. In the world at large, there are idiots everywhere.
Although I don’t see economic development as so much a tangential issue. As Shodan pointed out, this shit probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place without the extreme economic problems in Flint. If the NAACP wants to focus on long-term solutions and let the myriad other groups focus on the immediate lead issue, that’s OK with me.
If Flint were a rich town instead of being bankrupt, there wouldn’t be any urgency because there wouldn’t be any response needed. As for white, this kind of thing has been going on for thirteen years, under black mayors and white mayors and black emergency managers and white emergency managers.
Certainly true. The reason the Flint City Council voted 7-1 in favor of the plan to stop using Detroit water was to save money.
This is hardly new. Back in 1962 Flint was going to start getting its water from Lake Huron, but the deal blew up because of a different set of corrupt incompetents was in charge.