The author of the new book, "WE THE POISONED: EXPOSING THE FLINT WATER CRISIS COVER-UP AND THE POISONING OF 100,000 AMERICANS," is an independent investigative reporter who focuses on significant stories that the mainstream media often overlooks. He has made 20 reporting trips to Flint since 2016 investigating the water crisis and cover-up.
The following is an excerpt from his book published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Chapter 5 - Snyder's Warning
By Jordan Chariton
As I stood in line behind Flint residents, his presence among the row of bureaucrats in front of us caught my eye. There he was . . . in the flesh.
Ex-Gov. Rick Snyder (File photo)
Richard Baird, a bulky man in his early sixties, had been described to me as Governor Snyder’s “fixer” by several residents who had run-ins with him. More sinisterly, others called him Snyder’s “henchman.” The man was will- ing to do just about anything to protect his boss, they said. Now, at a Flint water town hall, he was sitting beside a row of officials from the EPA, city of Flint, and Genesee County. Residents had questions and concerns to express to government officials. I, too, had serious questions that no other journalists had been asking.
It was April 2017 and I was on my third reporting trip to Flint. I had read up on Baird and listened to residents share their experiences dealing with the man. Apparently he had introduced himself in a variety of ways: a Flint native, the governor’s “best friend,” or speaking “on behalf of” the governor. But as I inched up the line behind residents, sadly as the only journalist in the room attempting to ask these officials any questions, I found Baird’s body language odd. When EPA or city officials answered residents’ questions and complaints, Baird stared down. It seemed like he didn’t want to look residents in the eyes. Or maybe he just didn’t really want to be there. I knew Baird was prepared to go to the mat if he had to. Not for the sick citizens of his hometown, but for Rick Snyder.
Richard Baird
Several residents erupted in applause when I approached the microphone and identified myself. It felt good that after less than a year reporting in Flint, my work had earned the appreciation of residents.
I aimed my questions at Mark Durno, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator in Flint. Residents didn’t have many nice things to say to me about Durno, much like most of the government officials they had dealt with.
I asked why the water testing conducted by independent officials had been detecting a hell of a lot higher contamination levels compared to testing done by EPA-funded scientists and the Snyder administration.
I also asked why the Snyder administration was allowing Nestlé, the billion-dollar corporate behemoth, to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day from Michigan’s Great Lakes for an annual permitting fee of . . . $200. What sense did it make, I asked, that Nestlé could essentially steal water from Michigan’s pristine aquifer, only to bottle it and resell it to the poisoned residents of Flint? With the abundance of clean water in Michigan, wasn’t there enough to be provided to Flint for free in the middle of a water crisis?
Durno provided one of those long-winded, quintessential non-answer answers bureaucrats love to give. I pushed back saying it’s unacceptable for residents, whose eyes are burning while showering in Flint’s water, to be told, “Well gee, sorry folks, there’s no federal regulatory standards for showering and bathing.”
Durno kicked the can down the road, telling me he couldn’t answer since he wasn’t a health official. “That I think is a good placeholder for another discussion because we don’t have our public health experts with us.”
Sure Mark, I thought, while their eyes seared and their hair continued falling out while they showered, residents can rest assured that the EPA would set a “placeholder” for another “discussion.” Because, why have a public health expert at a town hall with poisoned Flint residents, right?
To my surprise, Baird took the microphone next and turned my way. With a straight face, the governor’s right-hand man began: “I’m not directly involved, I only know pretty much what I’ve read in the papers.”
Author Jordan Chariton
At the time I had no idea that less than two months earlier, Baird was very involved. He had stood in the Murphys’ living room seemingly trying to pay off the sick Flint couple with hush-hush, state-funded medical treatment.
The governor’s top adviser told me no final decision had been made by the Snyder administration as to granting Nestlé’s proposal to expand its quasi-theft of Michigan’s glacial water. The billion-dollar company was vying to increase its permit from extracting 250 gallons to 400 gallons of water per minute at one of its wells.
Smooth liar, I knew. Of course Snyder was going to approve it—and did one year later.
Perhaps more than any other official close to Snyder, Baird would become the go-to quarterback tasked with covering the tracks of the governor, him- self, and other top administration officials. Baird’s job, whether assigned to him or the result of him proudly volunteering, was to make sure the truth— that Snyder and his top officials knowingly hid from Flint that their water was toxic for at least a year and a half—would never come out.
Adding insult to grave injury, residents were in the dark that Snyder had received his own critical notification about the Flint River . . . a year before the city’s switched its water source to the Flint River. A warning that, if acted on, would have prevented the people of Flint’s entire nightmare.
TIMELINE TO CATASTROPHE: NOVEMBER 2012
According to Ed Kurtz, if Flint stopped purchasing water from Detroit and joined the KWA, greener pastures would present themselves. KWA was an “economic development” opportunity that would allow Flint businesses to purchase “low-cost water,” Kurtz wrote to Michigan state treasurer Andy Dillon in November 2012.1
EM Ed Kurtz
Kurtz also explored what he and many local officials saw as the city’s cheapest option: Flint using its own Flint River as a water source. For Flint lifers, the very notion of receiving drinking water from the city’s river was disgusting. Everybody knew the river had been a dumping ground for pol- lution and waste. This began in Flint’s nineteenth-century lumber mills and evolved into the next century with the boom of General Motors. At that time GM dumped 10 million gallons of waste into the river daily, including toxic substances like cyanide and hexavalent chromium (the cancer-causing carcinogen exposed by Erin Brockovich in California). Overall the Flint River was brimming with bacteria and organic matter, making it nineteen times more corrosive than the water Flint had received from Lake Huron via Detroit’s pipeline. Beyond the risks to public health, the river’s pollution made it more difficult for Flint’s water plant to chemically treat the water.
This toxic history likely weighed heavily in conversations between Flint officials and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ). After Howard Croft, Flint Public Works director, and Daugherty Johnson, the city’s utilities manager, consulted with MDEQ in December of 2012, Flint rejected the idea of using the Flint River. “It was based on information that we received from others within the city who said that MDEQ was not supportive of a long-term use of the Flint River,” Gerald Ambrose, Flint’s finance direc- tor, testified during a 2014 civil deposition unrelated to Flint’s water issues.
So, if the state environmental officials were against the city using the Flint River in 2012, how the hell could the same officials do nothing two years later as residents held up jugs of brown water? As children cried from rashes itching their bodies? As residents carried bags with locks of hair fallen from their heads?
Around the same time MDEQ rejected Flint using the Flint River, Governor Snyder’s administration jumped into the mix; Snyder’s treasury department green-lighted yet another engineering study to help determine Flint’s water future.
KWA CEO Jeff Wright
The results must have turned KWA CEO Jeff Wright bright red. Engineering firm Tucker, Young, Jackson, Tull, Inc. concluded Flint’s cheapest option was to keep purchasing water from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) and blend it with water from the Flint River.2 Tucker Young also determined that KWA and Wright were playing fast and loose with their financial estimates. In fact, KWA’s offer to Flint was underestimating the city’s costs to join by $100 million dollars, the Tucker Young report found. The firm cautioned Flint that the KWA did not provide the city with greater control of its water. Since Flint would only have a minority vote on KWA’s board, it would be vulnerable to water rate increases just like its current situ- ation getting water from Detroit.
Geez, who would accept that kind of deal?
Sheldon Neeley, a Flint city councilman at that time, seemed to agree with Tucker Young. Flint city council members were getting “bad information” from Mayor Walling and the state environmental department about the real costs of the KWA, Neeley told Flint criminal investigator Brian Stair, accord- ing to a confidential investigative report Stair authored in 2016.
But the KWA booster club wouldn’t be stymied. EM Kurtz, Flint mayor Dayne Walling, and other local officials were hell-bent on forging a Flint– KWA marriage. Wright slammed the report and claimed Tucker Young was biased because the firm had done consulting for DWSD in the past.3 Unhappy with its findings, Kurtz commissioned yet another engineering study. This one, again done by Rowe Engineering, recommended Flint join KWA. Unironically, Wright saw no bias at all with Rowe, who counted KWA as its client, concluding Flint’s best option was joining KWA.
At that point Flint had rejected as many as six offers from DWSD to remain a customer.
TIMELINE TO CATASTROPHE: MARCH 2013
As spring began, Kurtz and Wright accelerated their plan for Flint to join the KWA.
Wright pushed for Flint’s city council to hold a vote on the city joining the new water system. The vote was both critical and meaningless at the same time. For Wright, getting the council to vote yes on KWA was important. He reasoned that at some point the financial emergency in Flint would be declared over. When that day came, the elected mayor and city council would retake full power. Wright wanted to be able to say it was Flint’s city council— not the emergency manager—that approved Flint joining KWA.
On March 25, with cherry-picked and incomplete cost projections presented to them, the council voted 7–1 in favor of Flint joining the new water system. The yes vote authorized the city to receive sixteen million gallons of water per day from KWA. The procedure was merely symbolic. Even if the city council had voted no, Kurtz had the power to overrule them and would have. After the vote, a pleased Wright thanked Kurtz for allowing the city council to vote.
The next day a critical warning—one that could have prevented the entire Flint water crisis—was sent.
MDEQ's Stephen Busch (Photo: WNEM TV)
Stephen Busch, a supervisor with MDEQ, emailed colleagues about the ramifications of Flint using the Flint River as a water source. The city doing so would pose “an increased microbial risk to public health,” Busch wrote.4 If bacteria in your drinking and bathing water didn’t turn your stomach, there was more. Busch also warned that using the river on a long-term basis would lead to an “increased risk of disinfection by-product (carcinogen)” to resi- dents. In plain English: cancer-causing chemicals in the water.
There it was in writing, a year before Flint residents had received a drop of water from their river: using the Flint River would jeopardize Flint resi- dents’ health.
Busch then issued the same warning on a call with MDEQ director Dan Wyant and State Treasurer Andy Dillon. When grilled by special prosecutor Flood, Dillon didn’t deny it.
“So none of that stuff came out right [on the call]?” Flood asked. “I wouldn’t say that,” Dillon answered, playing coy. Flood also asked MDEQ director Wyant about Busch’s “microbial risk” warning. Bizarrely, he claimed he didn’t interpret Busch’s warning as a warning.
“I do remember reading it, but at that time I’m not aware of the risks of going to the river. At no time did I ever get an indication, then or subsequently, that the Flint River couldn’t be used; in fact, just the opposite. It was universally indicated to me by the people I relied on that that [use of the Flint River] could indeed happen.”
Through my reporting, I would learn that the conversation between Busch, Wyant, and Dillon catapulted the governor’s role from negligence to willful disregard. When a source familiar with the criminal investigation informed me, I did a double take and asked them to repeat themselves. They did—very definitively: after Busch issued his warning about the Flint River to Dillon and Wyant, they briefed Governor Snyder on the matter. In the briefing, they explicitly informed Snyder about Busch’s warning that if Flint used the Flint River, it would present the risk of residents being exposed to harmful bacteria and carcinogenic chemicals.
The ramifications of this were almost too major to describe. This placed the governor of Michigan receiving notice of the hazards of the Flint River a year before he allowed the city to make the switch to it. At this point even the thought of Flint using its river could have been nixed by Snyder and the powers that be. Yet discussions moved forward.
“All the way to the governor’s office,” Howard Croft, Flint’s public works director, said years later about Snyder’s culpability.5
The critical question was why it had to be the Flint River? My hunt for answers was only beginning.
