Senate Republicans on Friday said they started a probe into the Environmental Protection Agency’s culpability in the Flint, Mich., water crisis.
The probe was initiated Thursday night in a letter sent by Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas and senior members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana and Chairman James Inhofe of Oklahoma.
The letter was addressed to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy, requesting “all correspondence, including between EPA headquarters and the regional administrator, regarding the ongoing water quality crisis in Flint, Mich.,” the senators announced Friday.
The senators say their suspicions were raised after the EPA Region 5 administrator, Susan Hedman, resigned amid the crisis, and not long afterward, McCarthy said, “The EPA did its job.” Hedman’s resignation came shortly after the agency admitted it sat on information for months that showed the drinking water in Flint was contaminated with lead and did not warn the community.
“The stated mission of the EPA is to ‘protect human health and the environment,’ yet the agency’s failure to notify Flint residents that their drinking water was unsafe is a clear deviation from that mission,” the letter from the senators read.
“As you have alluded to before, leadership starts with you,” they wrote. “It certainly appears that the EPA did not take action, or at a minimum, alert citizens about the lead contamination. Instead, you have placed all accountability for your agency’s failures on your Region 5 administrator.”
The senators pointed out that in recent weeks Michigan officials have begun resigning in the wake of the lead contamination crisis, which has been elevated to a national campaign issue. A plan to aid Flint is holding up energy legislation in the Senate.
The crisis came to light months ago after an emergency manager appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder diverted the struggling city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the polluted Flint River to save money.
The river water was so corrosive that it ate away the lining of the lead pipes used to deliver water to the residents of Flint, driving up lead contamination to dangerously toxic levels for months before residents were alerted.
