Six Michigan employees cooked up false reports on the amount of lead in children’s blood and manipulated data to hide the true extent of the water crisis in Flint, state officials charged Friday.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced that three Michigan Department of Health and Human Services employees and three Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees were charged in the scheme.
The employees with the Department of Environmental Quality were Liane Shekter-Smith, Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services employees were Nancy Peeller, Robert Scott and Corinne Miller.
The employees are accused of manipulating data and coming up with bogus reports to mislead the public about the eastern Michigan city’s water problems. Schuette said the investigation shows just how little the bureaucrats cared about the residents of Flint.
“It’s part arrogance, it’s part viewing people in Flint as expendable,” Schuette said when asked about the motives of the charged.
In April 2014, a state emergency manager appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed off on a symbolic vote from the Flint City Council to change the city’s water source.
The move aimed to cut costs by requiring the city to take its water from the Flint River instead of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department while a new pipeline was built to connect the city to Lake Huron.
The Flint River water, however, was so acidic that it caused the lead pipes bringing water from the city’s cast iron mains into homes to corrode. Lead leached off the pipes and into the drinking water throughout the city.
State officials have been accused of improperly testing the water at Flint homes and skirting federal regulations to make sure the water complied with the federal Lead and Copper Rule. Independent researchers determined that bureaucrats avoided testing the water at the most affected in homes.
The state and the federal government have declared a state of emergency. In June, the state announced the water is safe to drink in Flint as long as it’s filtered.
Schuette said Peeler, the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Service’s Program for Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting, asked for an internal report on lead amounts in the blood of children in Flint during the summer of 2014. The report came was finished on July 28, 2015, and showed a significant spike in the lead levels, Schuette said.
Instead of making that public, Peeler, Scott and Miller buried it, he said.
“She buried it and released a bogus report that she and Robert Scott prepared,” Schuette said.
The two then went to Miller, “who instructed others not to take action when it was required,” Schuette added.
The second report showed no significant increase in lead amounts in children’s blood in 2014. That state report was then used to try to discredit independent investigators whose tests showed the amount of lead in children’s blood was increasing in Flint.
At the same time this was happening, the three Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees were manipulating water tests to conceal unsafe lead levels, Schuette said.
Shekter-Smith, who has been fired for her role in the crisis, ignored dozens of citizen complaints about the water in Flint, he said. In addition, she misled health officials about the Flint Water Treatment Plant’s viability.
“[The employees] misled health officials, insisting Flint’s 100-year-old water treatment plant … was functioning within the Lead and Copper Rules when the truth was far from that,” he said.
Schuette said Rosenthal ignored warnings from water treatment plant employees that the plant was not ready for operation and ignored Environmental Protection Agency warnings about corrosion. Instead, Rosenthal manipulated lead testing results and falsely reported that the lead levels were below the federal action level, according to the charges.
Rosenthal altered a report on July 28, 2015, to remove some high lead levels in the results, Schuette said.
Cook, who is responsible for compliance with the federal Lead and Copper Rule, misled the EPA about whether corrosion control was necessary in Flint’s water. Applying corrosion control chemicals to Flint’s drinking water could have stopped the city’s lead pipes from corroding and avoided the entire crisis, but Cook did not think it was necessary.
Instead, Cook sent the EPA information he knew to be false to placate federal regulators, Schuette said.
“Their offenses vary, but there’s an overall theme and repeated pattern,” Schuette said of the employees. “Each of these individuals attempted to bury, to cover up, to downplay … information that contradicted their narrative or their story. Their story was that nothing was wrong with Flint water.”
The charges brought Friday morning mean a total of nine people have been charged for the lead water crisis in the eastern Michigan town of 100,000. Three people were charged in April — two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees and one city of Flint employee.
The city employee, Mike Glasgow, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in exchange for his cooperation with investigators. The two state agency employees, Mike Prysby and Stephen Busch, await preliminary hearings in the case.
Investigators promised more people would be charged.
“There isn’t a case that has jarred my soul more than this,” said Todd Flood, an attorney acting as a special investigator on the case. “For the lack of caring, the lack of compassion, the lack of understanding that has affected the citizens here in Flint.
“You can’t make this up.”
