As expected, the various players involved in the Flint water crisis tried to deflect blame at today’s congressional hearing on the debacle, but they could not have expected the bipartisan backlash they received.
The long-awaited Capitol Hill hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened with a bang, according to news reports, as committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a conservative Republican from Utah, said:
“There is no acceptable level of lead in any water. What happened to Flint can never happen again. It’s almost unbelievable how many bad decisions were made.”
Congressman Elijah Cummings, a liberal Democrat from Maryland, expressed disgust at the fingerpointing that went on behind the scenes as Flint residents drank tap water tainted with sewage, bacteria linked to Legionnaire’s Disease, and high levels of lead. He highlighted a September 2015 letter from Gov. Snyder’s former chief of staff , Dennis Muchmore, in which he said former Flint mayor Dayne Walling was trying to protect his reputation by belatedly requesting $30 million for improvements to the city’s water system.
“It is sickening, all of it,” said Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
Cummings added that defensive testimony offered to the panel by former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley — “We were told our chemicals were hurting (factory) car parts, but not hurting humans” – was so tone deaf that the congressman said he “nearly vomited” when he heard the explanation.
Republican Congressman Buddy Carter of Georgia lowered the boom on Susan Hedman, the former regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who took the extraordinary step of resigning once the internal mistakes by her agency became public. When she told the committee that she and her staff had tried to rectify the crisis, Carter responded:
“Dr. Hedman, I’m sorry, there’s a special place in hell for actions like this.”
Walling
The committee also heard another version of Walling’s desperate attempts to emerge clean in this dirty-water tale. The former mayor once again implied that he and the Flint City Council opposed switching the city’s water source to the Flint River. Yet, shortly before the transition, Walling had boasted that city residents would soon enjoy “Pure Flint Michigan Natural Mineral Water.”
The one person who spoke truth to the powerful committee was Virginia Tech engineering professor Marc Edwards, a key figure in the expose of the Flint debacle.
Beyond the politics and partisan blame game, Edwards said he was “expecting” a situation like the Flint water crisis because of lax federal and state oversight.
“Incredibly, even as the National Guard walks Flint to install filters and distribute bottled water because of water lead dangers, Michigan and the U.S. EPA have insisted that Flint has always met standards of the EPA ‘Lead and Copper Rule,’” for drinking water pipes, he explained. “That claim is technically correct, because the EPA has effectively condoned cheating on the LCR since at least 2006.”
