September 24, 2019By Ron Fonger
Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards smirks during a hearing about the Flint water crisis in front of the U.S. House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform at the Rayburn House Office Building on Tuesday, March 15, 2016 in Washington D.C.
Flint - The Virginia Tech professor (click here) who helped expose the Flint water crisis, says people with their own agendas are perpetuating a false narrative that the city still doesn’t have clean water.
Appearing on the podcast “In Depth With Dr. Bob Leonard,” Marc Edwards said Flint’s water has been comparable in quality to community water supplies across the country for years but “many people have an agenda to make it appear the water is not better when it is."
Edwards has made similar comments previously, putting him at odds with Mayor Karen Weaver and others who have suggested he downplayed the fallout of elevated lead in Flint water in 2014 and 2015 -- when the city used the Flint River as its source of drinking water.
The professor’s work with citizens helped show the river water was never properly treated to make it less corrosive to transmission pipes and home plumbing, causing lead to leach into the water system....
It seems to me there has been a lot of mishandling of the Flint water and the people affected by it. I think it is time to get rid of the people that are still not capable of caring for people and find those that can.
September 9, 2019
By Patricia Taddonio
As summer approached, (click here) Shawn McElmurry, Dr. Paul Kilgore and Dr. Marcus Zervos were growing increasingly concerned.
The three men sat on a scientific panel that was formed to look into the source of a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Flint, Michigan. The spread of the disease coincided with the state switching the city’s drinking water supply to the Flint River — and it had gone on for more than a year before the public was notified.
Now, it was May 2016, four months since Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder announced both the existence of the outbreak and the creation of the panel, and the state health department still hadn’t officially authorized the panel to begin working, its members say.
The group knew how Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia caused by the waterborne legionella bacteria, operates: once the weather heated up, more people could die. So in May, they met with state health director Nick Lyon to warn him that it was urgent to step up monitoring for Legionnaires’ cases.
“I remember, at one point, my colleague telling him that if he didn’t do that, people could die,” McElmurry, (click here) an engineering professor and the chair of the panel, told FRONTLINE.
“Unfortunately,” McElmurry said, “Nick Lyon’s response was that ‘They’ll have to die of something.’”
That’s just one of the troubling alleged incidents reported in new detail — or for the first time — in Flint’s Deadly Water. Based on two years of reporting, the FRONTLINE documentary premiering Sept. 10 reveals how a public health disaster that’s become known for the lead poisoning of thousands of children also spawned one of the largest outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in U.S. history....
