The March 21 letter from Robert A. London, surface water treatment engineer at DEQ, came just two weeks before the agency announced the end of payments for bottled water because Flint’s water system quality had been restored.
Tiffany Brown, a DEQ spokeswoman, said in an email Thursday, May 3, that despite the long-term deficiencies, Flint’s water system "is currently producing very high quality drinking water and distributing it around the city and that is backed up by rigorous government and independent testing results."
"The department’s concern is the ability of the city to maintain that," Brown said in an email to MLive-The Flint Journal.
The department is also concerned about the viability of the funding for the system and the ability of the city to adopt a rate structure that will adequately support operation of the system.
Two weeks after expressing those concerns, state officials announced they were ending payments for bottled water, citing two years of testing that showed water in homes was below the federal action level for lead.
Weaver has protested an end to the bottled water program, which had cost the state an average of $22,000 a day this year, maintaining the water crisis won’t be over until all lead and galvanized service lines have been removed and replaced.
And not when the medical community and environmental experts tell us we still need to be on filtered water because of the ongoing work to replace all the lead-tainted pipes leading to homes in the city, a process that isn’t expected to be complete for at least another year."
State Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, on Thursday, May 3, called the decision to end bottled water weeks after the DEQ’s cited the continued "significant deficiencies" in the water system "very troubling."
"The state forced the shift (in water source) and caused the crisis," Ananich said.
In addition to the significant deficiencies identified in London’s letter, the engineer noted recommendations to Weaver, including the need to add features to the treatment system to "enhance treatment reliability and consistency, as well as operator safety."