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Virginia Professor Marc Edwards, a nationally renowned water expert who testified to Congress Tuesday on the Flint water crisis, blasted the Environmental Protection Agency and its former Midwest region administrator, Susan Hedman. He accused the ex-bureaucrat, who was listening, of unethical actions to hide the lead problem.
Hedman, who resigned in January in the midst of the controversy, sat on the same congressional panel and delivered an opening statement minutes earlier, saying she was proactive in addressing the Flint water crisis and was wrongfully accused of not doing enough and sitting on the sidelines. She said the crisis happened on her watch, and therefore resigning was the honorable thing to do.
"This should never have happened in the first place," she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "I need to remind you that EPA had nothing to do with that."
Edwards, a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who is credited with helping expose the Flint water crisis, ridiculed Hedman's statement.
"EPA had everything to do with creating Flint," he explained, saying it failed to act quickly and publicly disclose critical problems with the Flint water. "I purposely observed, witnessed and uncovered wrongdoing by Ms. Susan Hedman at the U.S. EPA in covering up this problem. Ms. Hedman in every step aided and abetted and emboldened unethical behavior of civil servants at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. She allowed Flint's children to be harmed."
He went on to blast the culture of the EPA and said "I can't help but comment on the qualities that seem to be valued in administrators at the EPA. Willful blindness, in this case to the pain and suffering of Flint residents. Unremorseful for their role in causing this manmade disaster and completely unrepentant and unable to learn from their mistakes."
Blame has been aimed mainly at Gov. Rick Snyder, former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley and the state Department of Environmental Quality.
While the EPA has certainly not gone blameless, Edwards' remarks are among the harshest public attacks against the federal agency since the crisis unfolded.
"I was not surprised when Flint occurred," he said. "I was expecting a Flint to occur" because the EPA had a history of allowing cheating on water tests around the country, as he tells it.
"Malfeasance at the U.S. EPA from 2001 to the present has harmed cities all over the United States," he said. "And incredibly even as national guard walked the streets of Flint distributing bottled water and installing filters on taps, Michigan and the EPA are able to say that Flint has never failed the lead and cooper rule.And this is possible because the EPA has effectively condoned cheating on the lead and copper ruling monitoring since 2006."
He talked about the history of the EPA and blamed the agency and other agencies from a similar leaded water crisis in Washington, D.C., from 2001 to 2004 "that was actually 20 to 30 times worse in terms of health harm to children."
He said EPA "completely covered that up for six years and wrote falsified scientific reports and created a climate in which anything goes across the United States, anything at all to cover up the health harm from leaded drinking water."
"If a landlord were to engage in similar practices, and through their negligence, to allow even a single child to be exposed to lead paint risk, the EPA would argue for prosecution and incarceration. Yet, the EPA has allowed entire cities to be unnecessarily exposed to elevated lead in their drinking water and they've covered up evidence of their unethical actions by authoring these falsified scientific reports."
"And they've never apologized for what they did in Washington, D.C., and incredibly to this day they have not apologized for what they did in Flint.
