opinion

When did state know kids in Flint were lead poisoned?

When did the State of Michigan first learn that kids in Flint had been poisoned by lead in the city's drinking water?

This is one of the most critical questions to answer in the aftermath of a public health crisis that's still unfolding in one of the state's largest cities.

And it shouldn't be a hard question to answer.

But when I asked Gov. Rick Snyder this week, he said he couldn't recall.

Officials at the state department of health say they didn't know what was happening until a Flint pediatrician released her own analysis in September -- even though data previously collected by the state showed the same trend, a reversal in a decades-long decline in the percentage of kids with lead in their blood.

And the health department has been stalling a Virginia Tech University researcher who has been trying to get public records that could show who knew what, and when.

It's ridiculous. Immediately after Snyder acknowledged there was a problem in Flint, the Free Press editorial board encouraged him not to slow-walk the postmortem. Snyder has appointed an after-action task force to find out what happened, and he told the Free Press this week that he's waiting for that report to provide answers to many of these questions -- but answers should certainly be readily available for the man in charge of the state departments involved in this fiasco.

So inconsistency and obfuscation continue.

Regardless of individual culpability, the water crisis in Flint has shown that the state systems designed to ensure safe drinking water and healthy children tilt toward inertia: Despite mounds of data, despite understanding the consequences of lead exposure, Flint was allowed to pursue a reckless water treatment program with the approval of everyone from the Flint City Council to the state Treasurer's Office and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

Flint switched its water supply in April 2014, drawing its drinking water from the Flint River while a new regional water system it plans to join next year is under construction. The local water treatment plant, with the approval of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, failed to add chemicals to the river water that would have prevented lead in aging service lines from leaching into the water. All of these decisions were made with the approval of a series of emergency managers, appointed by Snyder to guide the city back to financial stability.

Within months, the amount of lead in Flint's drinking water soared. Lead poisoning is irreversible, and can cause behavioral and developmental problems in children.

After an initial six-month round of testing was complete in January, results showed that the amount of lead in Flint's water was rising, although still within what state officials say they believed were federal safety guidelines. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency got involved; a memo written by an EPA water regulations manager found fault with both Flint's water treatment and MDEQ's water testing protocol. But nothing happened. State officials continued to insist that Flint's drinking water was safe, even as internal documentation showed that it wasn't.

So, we know that state officials knew that lead in Flint's water was rising, months before officials publicly acknowledged what was happening. But when should the state have known that the percentage of Flint kids with elevated blood-lead levels was growing?

Virginia Tech's Marc Edwards, a MacArthur genius grant recipient who has tested water samples from hundreds of Flint homes, submitted a request under the state's Freedom of Information Act for documents related to elevated blood-lead levels in Flint kids to the state health department in early November. The department notified him later that month that the documents he'd requested were ready. He paid the state's tab, and waited. He's still waiting.

A health department lawyer wrote in an e-mail to Edwards that a "litigation hold" placed by state Attorney General Bill Schuette's office, because of a lawsuit filed by Flint residents alleging the state acted improperly when it switched to river water, meant she couldn't release the documents. But Schuette's office told a Free Press reporter that there was no "litigation hold" (a term Free Press lawyer Herschel Fink, who has decades of experience litigating the rules surrounding public documents, said he'd never heard).

When Edwards informed the lawyer that the AG's office hadn't supported the notion of a litigation hold, the health department lawyer said she needed to review the documents to see if any were subject to attorney-client privilege. Again, Fink looked askance at this explanation: Public documents don't become private by simply virtue of being associated with a lawsuit.

Why is the health department stalling? I'm not sure, and it would be irresponsible to speculate.

For months, state officials denied that the water in Flint had problems. In July, MDEQ spokesman Brad Wurfel told Michigan Radio that folks in Flint could "relax." In an internal e-mail, Wurfel wrote that community groups were keeping people in Flint "hopped up." When Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Flint pediatrician, released her analysis of Flint kids' blood-lead levels, the state's immediate response, across multiple departments, was to attempt to discredit her work. Snyder's spokeswoman said the data used by Hanna-Attisha -- a pediatrician with degrees in medicine and public health -- was "spliced and diced."

And the health department, in response to a Free Press request, sent over a batch of blood-lead testing data that it said would refute Hanna-Attisha's conclusions. But a straightforward reading of the data showed that the state's own blood-lead testing data confirmed the doctor's findings, Free Press data analyst Kristi Tanner found. Yet the state health department continued to deny that the spike in blood-lead levels the doctor identified were anything but a seasonal anomaly. A week later, the health department reversed course, completely endorsing Hanna-Attisha's findings.

Health department spokeswoman Jennifer Eisner wrote in an e-mail: "We work closely with our 45 local health departments across the state to provide public health services. Historically, a request would come to MDHHS from the local health department to conduct epidemiological analysis before our department would have stepped in. As part of our after-action report, we continue to review how we will conduct this process in the future."

But here's the thing: For months, state officials worked diligently, not to investigate the brewing public health crisis in Flint, but to discredit outside experts presenting test results contrary to the state's assertions that everything was fine. And all that time, data that would have shown what was happening was ignored.

Why?

Contact Nancy Kaffer: nkaffer@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @nancykaffer.