Letter: Flint water crisis, DPS sickouts

Misplaced blame in Flint

I’ve served on NSF International’s Standard 61 Joint Committee since 1984. The standard establishes drinking water systems standards and protocols.

Standard 61 was initially funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to create a standard method to evaluate both Warner water distribution system and plumbing system material components to ensure that they would not corrode and introduce contaminants into drinking water at levels that would compromise human health.

The EPA instituted a requirement that when a utility considered a treatment technique change it must verify that the change would not make the water worse.

It seems to me that when a utility decides to change its source water it must ensure that the new source water also does not aggravate contamination of the drinking water to worse levels.

Clearly neither the Flint City Council, the utility, knowing the Washington D.C. situation and EPA rule, acted with utter disregard for public health.

Given the public health issues, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality let Gov. Rick Snyder down. The state Attorney General needs to go after those responsible. They did not undertake due diligence to mitigate this disaster for the citizens of Flint.

Craig Selover,

Huntington Woods

Solutions, not pickets please

I am so tired of pickets. When are they going to offer solutions. I sympathize with the hard-working teachers, but they are breaking the law. Where is their leadership with the suggestion to correct the issues and the funding ideas needed to do it?

How will their leadership resolve the pension shortfall? Why do you pay union dues? Most people know the problems but I expect more resolutions out of the Michigan Education Association.

If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Bernie Moore, Livonia

Glad for attention to Flint

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expressing the disgust and outrage that so many of us are feeling.

She’s drawn much needed attention to the human-rights crisis in Flint. The situation needs and deserves the most constructive and expeditious actions by all appropriate authorities and concerned citizens.

Stop blaming others for the political hot water you’re in Gov. Snyder. It’s nothing like the toxic water the people of Flint have been drinking.

Jill Farber-Bramson, West Bloomfield

Water crisis accountability

Like most people, we have been following closely the year and a half systematic poisoning of Flint residents by contaminated water. As we understand this man-made crisis, The Emergency Manager, appointed by Govern Snyder to supervise Flint's finances, decided to use the Flint river for water to save money and drop the city of Detroit Water.

The Flint river has long been an open sewer for industrial dumping. Lead poising is a life long sentence and will cause retardation, uncontrollable behavior and premature death for decades. Some of Gov. Snyder's environmental appointees, who apparently were asleep at the switch, have resigned but no one as yet has been in jail.

Now we learn the audacity of a Water Department sending out shut-off notices for people who have not paid there water bills. Flint residents are being send water shut off notices because they have not paid for dangerously polluted water.

Those responsible should pay.

Gerald Maxey, Farmington Hills