A Michigan regulator told investigators the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint was a creation of health officials in the city and was overblown.
Jim Sygo, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s chief deputy director, told investigators the lead water crisis is “overplayed” and “more created than anything else” by Flint officials, the Flint Journal reported Wednesday.
Sygo told Michigan State Police investigators, in a report obtained by the Journal, “there may be ulterior motives at play here.” He charged that two doctors at the city’s children’s hospital promoted the crisis to get Flint some funding.
Flint switched water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure at the behest, and approval, of state officials in April 2014. Since then, the more corrosive Flint River water ate away at lead pipes leading from city water mains to people’s homes, causing lead to leach into their drinking water.
Residents in the city of 100,000 people cannot drink their tap water without a filter, and Flint has been under a state and federal state of emergency since January.
A state investigation found the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was ultimately responsible for the crisis. Two agency employees have been criminally charged in the case.
Despite all that, Sygo said the agency never made a mistake in the crisis and told investigators “perhaps poor judgment was used,” according to the report.
Sygo said the employees who were fired or charged in the crisis were thrown under the bus by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.
He added that from 1897 to 1967 Flint used Flint River water and “the pipes were not destroyed in those 60-some years.”
“Mr. Sygo felt that a lot of this was overplayed as to what the crisis was in Flint,” the report stated.
Sygo supervises the state’s Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance.
