“The EPA buried this,” said Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards, whose water analysis in 2015 helped expose Flint’s contamination.
Obama had the EPA bury this
For months, Flint residents complained about the foul smell and dirty look of their water, and reported assorted health problems. Independent testing at Virginia Tech showed elevated levels of lead in the water in April 2015. Still, nothing was done until September, when researchers at Hurley Medical Center in Flint reported that blood tests showed a doubling of lead contamination in children younger than 5.
In February 2015, months before Edwards helped expose the contamination, an EPA water expert named Miguel Del Toral identified potential problems in Flint’s drinking water. He confirmed his suspicions in April and summarized the crisis in a June internal memo. The memo was kept under wraps by EPA Midwest chief Susan Hedman, and the analyst was forbidden from making his finding public, according to Edwards, who secured an embarrassing batch of EPA emails via Freedom of Information Act requests.
Hedman concedes that her department knew as early as April about the lack of corrosion control in Flint’s water supply, but said her hands were tied by interagency protocol.
“Protocol?” Edwards told me. “She buried the memo and gagged the analysis while kids were being poisoned.”
Even Walling, a Democrat like Hedman, said he doesn’t understand why somebody at Obama’s EPA didn’t give him a heads-up about Del Toral’s finding—even off the record—before Walling publicly testified to the water’s safety, chugging a glass of the poisoned liquid on television.
He rolled his eyes at Hedman’s suggestion that she needed a legal opinion on whether the EPA could force action.
“They hid it,” the Democrat said. “They knew and used the law as a shield against the truth.”
Just incredible for Fournier to now ask "where was media?" 8 natljrnl |
