The Disgrace of Flint's Poison Water

DB: So you would advocate ... subpoenaing the governor, and if he doesn't show up, just tracking him down and taking him into Congress?

MC: Absolutely. And that is what the law provides. And so we can't have two systems of justice. You know, where now a Michigan official has been ordered by U.S. Marshals, subpoenaed and ordered to appear before Congress. But the governor is sort of out of bounds for that kind of action. So we can't have citizens treated so differently in this country.

One of the things that, I just think is ... again, a two-tier system of justice, in this country: We have young men in prison now for possessing, you know, a little bit of marijuana, a couple of grams of marijuana and they're sentenced to 10, 20 years in prison. And we have federal government employees and we have state employees who have poisoned an entire city and no one has been charged. So we can't allow the government to operate with this two-tier system of justice. This isn't a democracy at this point. ... We need to really focus in on this. And then also the people of Flint, we need to really understand how the federal government is going to assist these families, going forward, with major medical and educational challenges before them.

And these families are going to really suffer a lot. I mean, they're already suffering because they're living in an economically depressed community. But now they're going to have children who are going to find it very difficult to learn.

And they're going to have other medical problems as a result of the lead poisoning. And so we need to try to understand how the government is going to assist these families, in helping these children with these enormous, enormous challenges that lie before them.

DB: Finally, I want to ask you, and I'm not being facetious here, if you were still in the EPA or if not ... what do you think would have happened if you're in EPA and you tried to go right to the President, or send an epistle through somebody who might be a little bit closer. And what do you think he would have done if he heard from an official like you who was concerned, on the ground, the city being poisoned. Has that ever happened?

MC: Well, a lot of us at EPA have gone to Congress, when we've tried to go through the bureaucratic channels, and communities are being poisoned ... you know, in my case I also reported that a community had been poisoned.

DB: Where did that get you? It got you a lot of hell.

MC: Exactly. It was hell because you become the target. ... I became the target, death threats and rape threats. And, eventually, of course, I was fired. So, it is a process. But we don't know what the President knew and we don't know when he found out. So did the President find out about the lead poisoning when all of us found out about it? Did he find out about the lead poisoning 6 months ago ... or 3 months ago? And if he did, what did he do about it? We don't have any of those answers, yet.

So now we have to rely on Congress to help us figure out this puzzle. ... It's the same puzzle that they grappled with at Watergate. What did you know, and when did you know it? We need to find that out. And then once we have those answers, the officials who for 6 months, or 4 months, or 3 months, or a month or whatever it was, allowed the residents of Flint, Michigan to continue to drink poisoned water, bathe in poisoned water, feed their children, allow their children to drink poisoned water. Those officials must be held accountable.

DB: Well, the President might have learned a little bit more if he had gone down there for a couple of days, and started handing out water, and dialoguing with the people who were poisoned. Probably a bunch of them voted for him.

MC: What's really sad, of course, is that those residents are getting like a couple bottles of water a day. So that means that they have to bathe in that one bottle of water, they have to bathe their children, using that one bottle of water. ... I mean it's almost just too sad to talk about. And yet we haven't seen the National Guard sent out, and put up tents, and places, for example, where people can just go and take a bath once a day. You know, we do that when we have disasters, the Red Cross and other emergency operations will go out and they'll put up large tents, and allow people to take a bath, or have a place to have clean water. But we haven't seen that happen in Flint. So this story just remains a very heart-breaking and very sad story.