In response to the overdue but increasing amounts of attention being paid to the lead-poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan governor Rick Snyder has released his emails relating to Flint from 2014 and 2015.
Up top is the first email in the pile, sent three months before the city switched from Detroit’s treated Lake Huron water supply to the water from the Flint River. The move was a temporary measure, and was intended to save about $5 million over two years; it has now killed at least 10 people and sickened up to 10,000.
Let’s get a closer look at what the rest of this extremely telling email says.
Sorry, what was that?
Sorry, I am a little rusty on that old provincial tongue called The Most Important Email In This Shitpile Has Been Totally Redacted. Show me whatever else you got.
GREAT!
Work your way through these emails if you dare: it’s a nightmarish tangle of local bureaucracy trying and failing to manage a city whose post-industrial depression has left it with no tax base, in which the wild decision to semi-permanently damage public health in the city by switching to a water supply from the notoriously unclean Flint River is laid out in terms like this resolution, signed by the emergency manager on March 29, 2013.
And elementary school students being lead-poisoned is reported to Snyder on October 8, 2015, like this:
Cool. We’ll be hearing more about these in the following days, but if you’d like to take a look, they’re here.
Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.