NPR’s Renee Montagne was interviewing federal EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy this morning when I got out of the shower. It was a good story that went on for seven minutes. They were discussing Flint. I didn’t hear most of it, but when asked when the water would be safe to drink again, I did hear McCarthy say this,
“The good news is that we did testing on the water filters and indeed the water filters do work very, very well even when the lead in the system is high.”
Now I don’t have any particular view on the role of EPA in this whole thing. I confess I don’t know enough about what they did or didn’t do. It is indeed good news that filters can remove lead from that water. And as part of that answer, McCarthy did concede that “it’s going to be a long time before people are comfortable drinking that water.” So it’s not really fair of me to launch into her or her agency, as I’d be more than happy to do to Snyder and his administration. And to her credit, the administrator did unambiguously say, in response to a question about the racial implications of the problem in Flint, “There is no question that this is an environmental justice issue.” Still, I do have a complaint about the report (which might come as no surprise to you)…
In response to a comment like this from the bureaucrats, be they from DC or East Lansing, it’s beyond me why reporters just let that kind of comment go. It’s institutional happy talk (true or false) that amounts to “Nothing to look at here, anymore. Move along.” In my not so humble opinion, any reporter who gets that sort of response from a top level official seeking to assuage concerns about some disaster should immediately ask this followup question.
“Did you drink the water, when you were there? Would you drink it and shower in it if you lived there?”
I don’t know if the good Governor Snyder’s appointed Flint city manager has a family or has kids, and I frankly don’t care to look it up in that browser window over there, but if he does I’d like to know, “Has he moved his family to Flint? Are they drinking our of bottles or from taps with these filters that (good news tells us) are working?”
I suspect I know how they’d both answer those questions. They’d make the story sound just a tad different, wouldn’t they?