Year: 2015

New Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request documents answer our earlier question: Where is the US EPA?

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While it is true that no one gets up in the morning intending to lead poison children, we previously argued that the agencies who created the Flint drinking water crisis worked awfully hard covering up their incompetence and Flint’s lead-in-water problems—in the process, they repeatedly left Flint’s children in harm’s way.

Two recent Freedom of Information act (FOIA) requests confirmed our worst fears as to what was occurring behind the scenes all of these months. Sadly, the e-mails also provided a disappointing answer to our earlier question: Where is the EPA?

We have created two e-mail chronologies that you can download, read, share and comment on for yourself. The first batch of FOIA documents is from the City of Flint, whereas the second set is from MDEQ. We will also post a Q+A with Flint Mayor Dayne Walling based on his e-mails with EPA later today.

Email communication between the City of Flint and US EPA:

Download (PDF, 2.11MB)



Emails between MDEQ and US EPA as well as MDEQ’s Public Comments during the Flint Water Crisis:

Download (PDF, 7.23MB)

MDEQ “leaked” FLINTWATERSTUDY FOIAs to…Reporters

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You cannot make this stuff up folks.

FLINTWATERSTUDY submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request back in early September for certain documents related to the Flint Water Crisis. We paid MDEQ $400 for them to produce the documents. After waiting and waiting, and pressuring MDEQ to stop wasting time, we finally received the documents at 5 pm on Wednesday October 14th. We promptly sent MDEQ Director Dan Wyant a series of questions on the content of the FOIAs at 11 am on October 15th and again on October 16th. Our questions to MDEQ have gone unanswered.

We had had the FOIA documents for a grand total of 46 hours, when to our surprise we discovered that MDEQ’s Brad Wurfel was leaking those very documents to reporters!

So we asked MDEQ:

Did you guys just send out the FOIA documents I paid nearly $400 for, and you made me wait over a month to get, to other reporters without my permission, and without any FOIA request? I have never heard of such a thing.

MDEQ proudly responded:

I started getting calls on it from reporters today. It’s all public information and they are asking for me to respond to it. When media ask me for information, I work to be transparent. You and others have asked the DEQ to be more transparent, and it is something we are trying to do.  

We have decided to release a detailed chronology tomorrow (10/19) morning of the FOIA documents. This will include:

a) emails between MDEQ and US EPA as the Flint Water Crisis unfolded in the past several months, and

b) emails between Mayor Walling and US EPA.

We will also be posting a Q+A with the Mayor, regarding the emails between him and the US EPA. Stay tuned!

Flint Trip #3: Quick Sampling Update

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Dr. Otto Schwake, Min Tang, and Ni “Joyce” Zhu are in Flint sampling the water for opportunistic pathogens, iron and lead before the switch to Detroit water. We will post an update on what we find very soon. Meanwhile, here is a photograph Joyce took when sampling water inside a Flint Hospital. We hope this is the last time we find something like this in a hospital or home in Flint.

Tap Water in a Flint Hospital on Oct. 16 (Picture courtesy: Joyce Zhu)
Tap Water in Flint’s Hospital on Oct. 16 (Picture courtesy: Joyce Zhu)

Watch the news coverage regarding our visit on ABC12 here.

[Podcast] Lead in Drinking Water, Is Flint a Washington DC 2.0 and other tales — A conversation with Dr. Yanna Lambrinidou

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Listen:

In response to requests about more information on the Lead and Copper Rule (or LCR), the Washington D.C. lead in drinking water crisis, and policy, roles of government agencies, and science communication issues especially w.r.t. to Flint, we thought it was best to record a podcast for interested folks. While we aren’t competing with NPR, we do believe listening to this 1 hour webisode is probably the best thing you can do today.

This podcast with Dr. Yanna Lambrinidou covers a wide variety of topics, but is essentially a primer to the Lead and Copper Rule and why it should matter to every U.S. citizen. In light of Flint’s water worries w.r.t. lead and other contaminants, we hope everyone, especially Flint residents, will benefit from this knowledge. We are grateful to Yanna for being so cheerful and supportive of us and our work, and also for such an insightful interview.

Interview by: Siddhartha Roy

yanna

Yanna Lambrinidou is a medical ethnographer and adjunct assistant professor in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) program at Virginia Tech. For the past 8 years, she has conducted extensive research on the historic 2001-2004 Washington, DC lead-in-drinking-water contamination. This work exposed wrongdoing and unethical behavior on the part of engineers and scientists in local and federal government agencies. In 2010, Dr. Lambrinidou co-conceived the graduate level engineering ethics course “Engineering Ethics and the Public,” which she has been co-teaching to students in engineering and science. She is co-Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF) research and education project developing an ethnographic approach to engineering ethics education.