The Environmental Protection Agency was on the defensive Monday after it failed to stop a water contamination problem from escalating in Flint, Mich.
“EPA did its job but clearly the outcome was not what anyone would have wanted,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy after visiting a Washington soup kitchen. “So we’re going to work with the state, we’re going to work with Flint. We’re going to take care of the problem,” she told reporters.
“We know Flint is a situation that never should have happened,” she said.
Flint has struggled for months to clean up a lead-contamination problem, after the state took direct control of the cash-strapped town’s drinking water supply. The state’s move to switch the city’s water supply to a cheaper source has been blamed for the contamination.
McCarthy’s comments come just days after the Detroit News reported that the EPA knew about the dangerous contamination of Flint’s drinking water for months without informing the public.
On Sunday night, the crisis in the Michigan factory town made its way into the 2016 presidential debates. Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton took aim at the state’s governor, Republican Rick Snyder, for his handling of the situation.
“We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African-American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care,” Clinton said during the debate held by NBC in South Carolina.
A day earlier, President Obama declared the situation in Flint a federal emergency.
