An article from Mlive.com, "State employees required to report health, safety threats in Gov. Whitmer’s first executive directive" by Emily Lawler, 1/2/19, reports on the new Governor's first executive directive of her administration that begins to tackle the problem of water contamination in Michigan.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed her first executive order on 1/2/19 establishing a chain of command for state employees to report threats to public health and safety.
"'The people of Michigan deserve to know that their government is working for them, and our government employees deserve to know that they can speak up when they see threats to Michigan’s health and safety,' Whitmer said before signing her first executive order."
The order was in part a response to the Flint water crisis where a state-appointed emergency manager failed to act to protect the city against lead contamination of its water supply.
Another worrisome source of water contamination in Michigan was covered by Garrett Ellison on Mlive.com, "Major warning about Michigan PFAS crisis came 6 years ago" on 7/12/18. PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) have been found in Michigan waterways and drinking water supplies. Robert Delaney, a veteran geologist at the Department of Environmental Quality “..took his concerns about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, to state environmental leaders more than six years ago in a prophetic report that called for decisive action on a looming health crisis…His alarm bell was largely ignored.”
“‘Communities with fire training facilities, other Department of Defense (DOD) bases, metal platers, other major airports, major transportation corridors, and other industrialized areas all could have extensive contamination by (PFAS),’ Delaney wrote.”
“…nearly six years after Delaney's warning about the dangers and potential ubiquity of PFAS, his predictions are coming true. Numerous sites around Michigan have known PFAS plumes and the list keeps growing as testing and attention escalates. So far, the number is 31 and counting across 15 communities, where neighbors are questioning whether contaminated water is to blame for chronic diseases.”
A few months ago we began seeing signs along our beloved Huron River warning us not to eat the fish. And that white foam that we see on the banks from time to time may be related to PFAs.
Among the sources of contamination are fire retardents, food packaging materials, numerous household products, and drinking water.
“Following an October 2010 presentation on PFAS to the EPA, Department of Defense and an interstate regulatory group, Delaney wrote that his talk was 'well received, if you consider stunned silence a good reception.'"
There is more information on PFAS from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Website :
“…Studies indicate that PFOA and PFOS can cause reproductive and developmental, liver and kidney, and immunological effects in laboratory animals. Both chemicals have caused tumors in animals. The most consistent findings are increased cholesterol levels among exposed populations, with more limited findings related to:
- low infant birth weights,
- effects on the immune system,
- cancer (for PFOA), and
- thyroid hormone disruption (for PFOS). "
Finding and reporting on sites of contamination are the first step in protecting citizens against the effects of PFAS. This is especially important in light of the apparent attempt to suppress Delaney's 2012 report and restricting Delaney's access to news media:
"Although Delaney has been a regularly accessible expert on PFAS contamination in Michigan, his freedom to speak with news media was curtailed at DEQ last fall [2017] after he talked about the report on the radio. The agency would not make him available for this story despite multiple requests over several months.
Requiring state officials to warn the public about risks to health and safety should have gone without saying, but the Governor’s first executive directive removes any ambiguity on this issue.
Since the country has been made aware of the poisoning of the Flint Michigan water supply with lead from corroded pipes, stories about lead contamination have been popping up everywhere. The danger with this is that the public becomes numb to the consequences of water contamination and the problem seems too big to solve. We throw up our hands and check off another reason to distrust government solutions to big problems.
The fact is that the old lead pipes in Flint can be replaced and should be, starting now. It will be a long and expensive slog to correct the problem and there may not be any way to make the children exposed to lead poisoning completely whole again, but we have to start somewhere. Despair is not a solution.
An op-ed in the New York Times, “Blame HUD for America’s Lead Epidemic” by Emily Benfer, 3/4/16, exposes conflicting federal regulations that have resulted in the acceptance of high levels of lead exposure for residents of public housing.
According to Benfer, the standards for public housing from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sets the level that defines lead poisoning three to four times higher than that set by the Centers for Disease Contol and Prevention (CDC): “While the C.D.C. recommends intervention for lead poisoning at 5 micrograms per deciliter, HUD regulations do not call for action until after a child’s blood lead level is 20 micrograms per deciliter, or 15 to 19 micrograms per deciliter over three months — levels that cause severe and permanent brain damage.”
She continues: “These regulations are the most egregious contributors to the epidemic of lead poisoning in public and low-income housing. I have spent six years working with Loyola University Chicago law students, the Erie Family Health Center and civil legal aid organizations on cases involving low-income families living in unhealthy housing. We have seen firsthand how chipping, cracking lead paint creates toxic living conditions.”
The solution to this problems is within reach of us mere mortals by getting Congress and federal regulatory agencies to bring standards into alignment and start correcting the problem that causes children to suffer from our neglect.
In another regulatory mismatch much closer to home, the conflict between standards for dioxane contamination in groundwater between the State of Michigan and the federal Environmental Protection Agency has resulted in children and their families being exposed to unacceptably high levels of a carcinogen because the state failed to correct its standards for groundwater contamination to conform with the EPA.
An article in the Ann Arbor News, “Family with poisoned well finally getting municipal water services”, by Ryan Stanton, 3/4/16, describes the plight of a family that has been using contaminated well water for over two years because they were assured by the Pall Corp. that took over ownership of the company that originally caused the contamination, that “the water was safe to drink with dioxane concentrations at 17 parts per billion because it's below the state's 85 ppb standard.” They were not told, however, that the federal EPA standard shows that dioxane at 3.5 ppb in drinking water poses a 1 in 100,000 cancer risk, the standard that the state sets at 85 ppb.
According to the article, “local officials have been fighting for years to convince the state to move to a stricter standard to reflect the latest findings about dioxane published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2010. The DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality] was required by law to update the standards by December 2013, but Lansing politics and technical problems have been blamed for repeated delays and missed deadlines.”
State officials acknowledge the problem and “the Michigan Department Environmental Quality is proposing to move to a single-digit standard sometime this year.”
The Pate family that has been living with dioxane-contaminated well water has retained an attorney.
Heather Pate is quoted in the article: "Too many times politicians get away with stuff… They're not going to get away with this one. We're not going to let it happen. And we're not doing this for money. I want them in prison. I want them doing time."
This sounds about right to me.
I have already heard people trying to downplay the Flint water crisis by saying that the lead poisoning wasn't as bad as reported or that the city is responsible for this because it did not manage its budget properly. When Flint changed its water supply in April 2014 under an emergency manager who was brought in to resolve the financial crisis in the city, the people in charge decided to save a little money by not adding phosphate to the Flint River water. Phosphate prevents the corrosion of old pipes that otherwise leach lead into the water supply and would have prevented the disaster that followed.
A recent article in the Detroit Free Press "All Flint's children must be treated as exposed to lead" by Kristi Tanner, 1/16/16, includes these recommendations to the State:
"In recommendations to the state on Monday, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said all kids under the age of 6 should be treated with some kind of prevention actions.
"Eden Wells, the state's chief medical executive, said Monday that all children who drank the city's water since April 2014 have been exposed to lead. 'It is important when we think about a public health perspective that we consider the whole cohort ... exposed to the drinking water, especially 6 years and under since April 2014, as exposed, regardless of what their blood level is on Jan. 11.'
"The state's most recent report, based on tests conducted between October and December 2015, shows that 43 people — only a small portion of the number exposed — had elevated blood lead levels. That's because these tests measure only the amount of lead in a person's blood, which decreases after about 30 days, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
See video here from CNN.
