Finally, at long last, former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was charged for the Flint water crisis.
Unfortunately, it is only a misdemeanor. He did a lot of damage. Based upon what I read, I am not optimistic about the outcome.
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was charged Wednesday with willful neglect of duty after an investigation of ruinous decisions that left Flint with lead-contaminated water and a regional outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.
The charges, revealed in an online court record, are misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
The charges are groundbreaking: No governor or former governor in Michigan’s 184-year history had been charged with crimes related to their time in that office, according to the state archivist.
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Here is a run down of the Flint water crisis from wikipedia. Thousands of children were exposed and there was an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.
Between 6,000 and 12,000 children were exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead.[2] The water supply change was considered a possible cause of an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in the county that killed 12 people and affected another 87, but there is no evidence of a clear link
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Scientific American sees a strong link between lead in water and Legionnaires’ disease.
.“Our team recognized that the conditions in Flint—a corrosive new water source in an aging water system—were just right for Legionella,” Pruden says. So before the city switched back to Lake Huron water in October 2015, the scientists decided to sample Flint’s water for Legionella, iron, and free chlorine. At the time of sampling, Flint had already experienced outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease in June 2014 and May 2015, but the researchers were unaware because public health agencies did not notify the public about the outbreak. In homes supplied with Flint River water, the scientists recorded Legionella concentrations roughly seven times as high as those found in the baseline surveys. The researchers measured a mean concentration of 1,890 gene copies/mL of L. pneumophila in the hospitals, about 470 times as high as the alert threshold of 4 gene copies/mL suggested by a recent study (Mol. Cell. Probes 2015, DOI: 10.1016/j.mcp.2014.09.002)
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.Water supply has been found to be the one and only commonality in the majority of Legionnaires’ Disease cases.
I know. I don’t understand it . If we understand causation and we see very strong correlation (the majority of Legionnaires’ Disease cases have only water supply in common) , then why can’t prosecutors obtain convictions ?
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.Snyder, a Republican who has been out of office for two years, was governor when state-appointed managers in Flint switched the city’s water to the Flint River in 2014 as a cost-saving step while a pipeline was being built to Lake Huron. The water, however, was not treated to reduce corrosion — a disastrous decision affirmed by state regulators that caused lead to leach from old pipes and poison the distribution system used by nearly 100,000 residents. At the same time, bacteria in the water was also blamed for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. Authorities counted at least 90 cases in Genesee County, including 12 deaths. The outbreak was announced by Snyder and Lyon in January 2016, although Lyon conceded that he knew that cases were being reported many months earlier.
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.He knew earlier than he said under oath.
Rick Snyder knew about Flint water crisis earlier than he testified under oath, according to new report
To paraphrase the famous Watergate question, what did former Gov. Rick Snyder know about the Flint water crisis, and when did he know it? According to a bombshell report published on Thursday by VICE, much more than he previously acknowledged — and long before he did.
Reporters Jordan Chariton and Jenn Dize spent more than a year and a half interviewing top officials and poring through hundreds of pages of confidential documents provided by sources involved in the criminal probe of the water crisis, who were granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. The findings suggest a coordinated, years-long cover-up that goes all the way up to Snyder.
One source with knowledge of the probe alleges Snyder and his cronies “committed conspiracies of ongoing crimes, like an organized crime unit.”
Among the many new allegations in the piece: Snyder was warned about the dangers of using Flint River water in 2013, a year before the disastrous switch occurred; that Snyder knew of Flint’s Legionella outbreak as early as October 2014, 16 months earlier than he claimed under oath during a Congressional testimony; and that an investigation into the alleged fraud in the Karegnondi Water Authority bond deal was dropped because ultimately the state, which signed off on the deal, would be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars owed to big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.