This is no surprise. lead lines + no treatment = high lead in water = lead poisoned children.

You have a city that has lead lines and no treatment that is collecting pre-flushing which we know can easily miss very high lead levels. We do nothing to stop that.

We have an independent group taking samples that show much higher lead levels and what do people do? They question the VT data, rather than saying anything about the City's data from sampling that we know can miss the lead and on top of that we just found out the city may have lied on the reporting forms to [the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality] in stating that all of the sites they used had lead service lines when they apparently do not have any information that they could possibly have used to make those determinations. To mean that means you have to throw out both rounds of data unless they can provide the supporting documentation. And since they admitted they do not have it, what do we do? Nothing again?

I can't recall what R5 decided on the MI disinvestments, but I very seriously hope that we did not allow MDEQ NOT to issue violations for failure to submit the [federal Lead and Copper Rule] reporting forms. It is only by way of having these forms from Flint that we became aware that what they reported for each of the monitoring sites is not true. If I am a lawyer, and someone puts down on a form that every site is a lead line site, and they cannot produce a single piece of information that they used to make the determination that they are lead line sites... isn't that false reporting at a minimum? And when all of this results in a town full of lead-poisoned children, doesn't that mean anything to anyone?

Even worse, absent anything from EPA, MDEQ and the City, other than 'they are in full compliance' other folks have to alert the public to the risk. We now have data from yet another independent group that appears to show that the children are in fact, being poisoned.

At every stage of this process, it seems that we spend more time trying to maintain State/local relationship than we do trying to protect the children. I said this from the very beginning and I will say this again...you don't have to drop a bowling ball off of every building in every city to prove that gravity (and science) will work the same way everywhere. It's basic chemistry.

There is nothing that can be done in the immediate future with respect to treatment that can prevent more children from being further damaged. Someone needs to require that the residents of Flint be provided with water filters until they can fix the treatment.

Sorry for the rant, but i am very upset about this because I told people this was going to be the outcome. I watched this movie before in Washington, DC [which suffered a similar lead water crisis in the early 2000s]. and we are heading down the exact same path of denial and delay and meanwhile, the children are being irreparably damaged.