WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) — The head of the EPA was told she should resign Thursday by a House committee chairman at a contentious hearing on the water crisis in Flint, Mich.
In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy blamed each other’s agencies for the response to the discovery of high levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water.
Flint’s drinking water was discovered to be contaminated with high levels of lead in April 2014, after the city switched its water source from Lake Huron water treated by Detroit’s water treatment system to water from the Flint River, processed by Flint’s water treatment system.
Addressing the committee, Snyder, R-Mich., said: “Let me be blunt. This was a failure of government at all levels. Local, state, and federal officials, we all failed the families of Flint. This is not about politics or partisanship. I am not going to point fingers or shift blame; there is plenty of that to share, and neither will help the people of Flint.”
But Snyder went on to testify that a water expert at the EPA had “tried to raise an alarm” about Flint’s unsafe drinking water in February of 2015, but was silenced.
McCarthy, in her statement, responded: “From day one, the state (Michigan) provided our regional office with confusing, incomplete and incorrect information. Their interactions with us were intransigent, misleading and contentious. As a result, EPA staff were unable to understand the potential scope of the lead problem until a year after the switch and had insufficient information to indicate a systemic lead problem until mid-summer of 2015.
“While EPA did not cause the lead problem, in hindsight, we should not have been so trusting of the state for so long when they provided us with overly simplistic assurances of technical compliance rather than substantive responses to our growing concerns.”
Committee chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, challenged McCarthy’s remarks, noting that the EPA had the authority to correct Flint’s water issues but did not. The EPA, McCarthy said, pressured the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to act more aggressively in fixing pipe corrosion in the city: It issued an order requiring Michigan to address Flint’s problems in January 2016, but, McCarthy said, was misled by state and local officials.
“We couldn’t do our jobs effectively,” she said.
Chaffetz, citing McCarthy’s comment about a regional administrator’s “courageous” resignation over the matter, told her, “You had the opportunity (to act), you had the presence, you had the authority, you had the backing of the federal government, and you did not act when you had the chance. And if you’re going to do the courageous thing then you, too, should resign.”
