Emails: EPA chief warned Flint crisis could get 'very big'
Source: Associated Press
Emails: EPA chief warned Flint crisis could get 'very big'
John Flesher, Ap Environmental Writer
Updated 5:44 pm, Wednesday, March 16, 2016
As university researchers and local doctors went public with concerns of drinking water lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy ordered some top staff members to focus on the matter and said it could "get very big very quickly," according to emails released Wednesday.
"Seems like the Flint lead issue is really getting concerning," McCarthy wrote Sept. 26 in a message to other EPA officials, among 1,200 pages of emails The Associated Press obtained Wednesday under a Freedom of Information Act request.
McCarthy was responding to an email the previous day from Susan Hedman, then the head of the EPA's regional office in Chicago, who resigned in January amid complaints from the public and elected officials that the agency hadn't reacted urgently enough after learning Flint's water was tainted with lead. By that date a Virginia Tech professor and local doctor had made public warnings about elevated lead levels, although an EPA staffer had raised alarms about the lead problem five months earlier.
The city of nearly 100,000 had switched its water source from the Detroit system, which draws from Lake Huron, to the Flint River as a temporary cost-saving measure in April 2014 while under state management, with plans eventually to join a consortium that also would use lake water. But the river water wasn't treated with anti-corrosion chemicals, an omission that let lead leach from old pipes into the drinking water.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Emails-EPA-chief-warned-Flint-crisis-could-get-6894162.php
How do Republican presidential candidates justify their plans to destroy the EPA?
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It is already a colossal criminal fuckup of the highest order....and it's going to get even shittier?
Fucking hell.