Flint Water- more details about state involvement.

[twohearted]

www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2015/12/23/states-handling-flint-water-samples-delayed-action/77367872/

LANSING — Lead levels in Flint's drinking water would have spurred action months sooner if the results of city testing that wrapped up in June had not been revised by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to wrongly indicate the water was safe to drink, e-mails show.

The records — obtained by the Michigan ACLU and by Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who helped raise concerns about Flint's water — show how state officials first appear to have encouraged the City of Flint to find water samples with low lead levels and later told Flint officials to disqualify two samples with high readings. The move changed the overall lead level results to acceptable from unacceptable.
The e-mails also show that DEQ district coordinator Stephen Busch told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Feb. 27 that Flint had "an optimized corrosion control program" to prevent lead from leaching into the drinking water from pipes, connections and fixtures. In fact, the city — disastrously — had no corrosion control program.

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Why those DEQ officials took the actions they did is a question at the center of a tragedy that has left an unknown number of children and other Flint residents poisoned by lead, and has led to a federal lawsuit and calls for a U.S. Justice Department investigation. The questions surrounding the testing are in addition to the broader question of why Flint, which was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager at the time, switched its drinking water source, starting in April 2014, from Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit to the much more polluted and corrosive water from the Flint River.
Brad Wurfel, a spokesman for DEQ Director Dan Wyant, declined to say Tuesday why Busch gave inaccurate information to the EPA, why another DEQ official told Flint officials he was hoping they would send him water samples showing low lead levels, or why the DEQ was strict in disqualifying certain water samples with high lead readings but not strict in disqualifying other samples showing low lead levels that did not appear to meet the sampling criteria.

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"Most of these questions regard issues presently before the governor's independent after-action review panel," Wurfel told the Free Press in an e-mail. "We don't want to get in front of that review."
On June 25, Adam Rosenthal, of the DEQ's Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, sent an e-mail about the water samples, required under the federal Lead and Copper Rule, to Michael Glasgow, a utilities administrator with the City of Flint.

Detroit Free Press file photo
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality revised downward the results of water samples in Flint.
"Just wanted to remind you/confirm that Flint is on track for a few items," Rosenthal wrote in the e-mail, which he copied to two other DEQ officials.
"We hope you have 61 more lead/copper samples collected and sent to the lab by 6/30/15, and that they are will be (sic) below the AL (action level) for lead," the e-mail said. "As of now with 39 results, Flint's 90th percentile is over the AL for lead."

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If 100 lead-in-water samples were listed in ascending order, the 90th percentile would be the 90th sample, meaning 10 samples would have higher readings. To stay below the "action level," which triggers requirements for public notification and steps to reduce the amount of lead in the water, the 90th percentile for Flint's drinking water samples had to be at or below 15 parts per billion. To put it another way, Flint's water would reach an action level if more than 10% of the samples exceed 15 parts per billion.
Melissa Mays, a Flint resident who drank the contaminated water along with her three boys, said there is only one way to read the Rosenthal e-mail.
"The MDEQ informed the City of Flint that they were in danger of going in violation, and they asked for low samples," Mays told the Free Press.
Wurfel wouldn't comment when asked if that's how the e-mail should be interpreted. Rosenthal did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. Busch, who was copied on the e-mail Rosenthal sent to Flint, sent an automated e-mail reply that said he is out of the office until Jan. 4.
Had Flint's water sampling come in above the action level, it would have triggered action in July. Instead, it was not until October, after blood test results showed elevated lead levels in Flint children, that the DEQ admitted making a mistake about failing to require the addition of needed corrosion control chemicals to the Flint River water. The state also provided funds to help Flint reconnect to Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit.
The EPA requires that water sampling be done at "high-risk" locations whenever possible. To comply with that, the American Water Works Association says cities such as Flint should collect 50% of samples from homes with lead service lines. For the samples taken in 2015, the EPA rules also required that Flint sample the same 100 homes it sampled the previous year, between July and December of 2014.
But the City of Flint didn't get 100 samples in 2015. After receiving Rosenthal's e-mail expressing a hope for samples below the action level, the city in the next five days collected 30 additional samples, all of which were below the action level.
The DEQ decided that fewer than 100 samples would suffice because Flint's population had dropped below 100,000.
But Edwards said the smaller number of samples the DEQ allowed still should have come from the group of 100 homes tested a year earlier and should have all come from homes at high risk for lead.
The Michigan ACLU, and later the Flint Journal has reported that seven of the additional samples the city collected, or nearly 25% of them, came from a single stretch of Flushing Road in Flint, where the city had replaced a lengthy session of water main in 2007. Not surprisingly, all of those samples measured very low for lead.
In all, the newspaper reported, only 13 of the homes sampled were from the same list of 100 homes tested in 2014. All the homes that were sampled for a second time in 2015 had tested low for lead in 2014. None of the homes that in 2014 had lead levels above the 15 parts per billion action level were sampled a second time.
Edwards told the Free Press the samples were "cherry-picked," and that's a violation of federal law.
Wurfel would not comment when asked if that was the case.
Even then, the 71 samples Flint relied on would have put the city's water above the action level under the original report Flint prepared, dated July 28. Only after two high lead samples were disqualified at the direction of the DEQ, bringing the total number of samples used down to 69, was the water found to be at 11 parts per billion for lead, below the action level.
The revised report, dated Aug. 20, included the following comment from Flint utilities administrator Michael Glasgow: "Revised report after conference call with DEQ staff. Two samples were removed from list for not meeting sample criteria ..."
One of the disqualified samples, which showed lead at more than 100 parts per billion, came from the home of LeeAnne Walters. Walters had subsequently been retested with results coming back even worse and was visited by an EPA official in April. That EPA official, Miguel Del Toral, found that Walters' indoor plumbing was plastic and could not be the source of the high lead readings, as the DEQ had suggested to him.
The DEQ disqualified another high lead-level sample because it did not come from a single-family residence.
On Aug. 4, Walters, other community activists, and concerned pastors met at the Capitol with top aides to the governor and officials from the DEQ. Waliters asked why her sample wasn't used and didn't get an explanation. She and others at the meeting say Harvey Hollins, an aide to Gov. Rick Snyder who was last week named the state's point man on the Flint water issue, instructed DEQ officials to get back to her on why her sample wasn't used.
Walters says she never received that explanation, but the DEQ produced a letter sent to Walters by e-mail in response to a FOIA request from Edwards.
In the Aug. 25 e-mail, Liane Shekter Smith, who at the time was the chief of the DEQ's Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance but was reassigned in October after the DEQ acknowledged oversight mistakes in connection with Flint's drinking water, tells Walters her results were disqualified because she uses a water filter.
Walters said that she had been instructed to remove the filter before taking any water samples and always did so.
Though it was strict in disqualifying the high samples from Walters, the DEQ did not strictly enforce other requirements related to the samples, such as that they all come from the same group of homes sampled a year earlier, or that they come from homes at high risk for lead.
"The state is the one monitoring these decisions," Walters said. "They should be doing their job accurately. Someone should be holding them accountable for not doing things the way they were supposed to."