Flint water crisis: Three officials charged over polluted water supply

It is the first time anyone has been charged for the public health disaster

Governor Snyder told reporters not to lose sight of the '47,000 wonderful people' who work for the state (Getty Images)

Three officials are facing charges for their involvement in the Flint water crisis in Michigan which resulted in around 100,000 people drinking lead-contaminated water since 2014.

The charges, authorized on Wednesday by District Judge Tracy Collier-Nix, are the first to be brought against the state of Michigan since the scandal was exposed in 2015.

Mike Glasgow, the city’s laboratory and water quality supervisor; Mike Prysby, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official; and Stephen Busch, the suspended Lansing district coordinator for the DEQ’s Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, have all been charged, as reported by the Detroit Free Press.

The men face six, five and two criminal charges respectively, ranging from misconduct in office and conspiracy to tampering evidence and willful neglect.

Mr Glasgow was accused of not testing the water supply of homes that were most at risk of lead contamination, and saying the ones he had tested all had lead pipes, which was reportedly false.

Mr Prysby allegedly played a part in pushing the local water treatment plant into operation before it was ready, and said they could rely on six-month studies to determine if they needed corrosion control chemicals to treat the water.

Mr Busch told a US Environmental Protection Agency official that that Flint Water Treatment plant was using “optimised corrosion control” when in fact it was not using any controls.

Michigan governor Rick Snyder told the press: “We encouraged the investigations and we’ve been cooperating.”

“We’ve got a lot of wonderful people working for the State of Michigan,” he added. “Let’s not let the possible situation of a handful affect all 47,000.”

More charges are expected. At a previous hearing, Mr Snyder was accused himself of “dripping with guilt” by Representative Matt Cartwright.

He had reportedly known about the polluted water supply for months before he was forced into co-operating with authorities.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said at a press conference on Wednesday that the men facing charges and their involvement caused him and other people "anger and despair".

“The things you take for granted don’t happen in Flint,” he said. ”When you jump out of bed, you wash your face, brush your teeth, take a shower, that’s not normal in Flint. As a husband, father, attorney general and lawyer for the city of Michigan, I’m going to find the truth.“

He said authorities are working through around 2.5 million emails to determine who knew what and when.

He said the judge would decide on the sentencing, but he added: “I think they [the three men] ought to be behind bars.“

Asked whether Governor Snyder would face charges, he replied: “There is no target and nobody is off the table. I can’t be clearer than that.”

Andrew Arena, who ran several major investigations as head of the Detroit FBI Office until he retired in 2012, told the press that his wife asked him why he had “gone back into this” when he already “had a nice life”.

“The people of Flint deserve answers,” he said.

The water supply was switched from Detroit to a river in Flint in April 2014 and became contaminated with lead as the river water corroded the lead lining of the pipes.

Mr Snyder is encouraging residents to use their taps again as authorities have been treating the pipes with higher levels of phosphates to build up a protective coating on the pipes and prevent further lead leaking into the water.

They are still investigating whether there is a link between the river water and an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease among local people.

Local resident Melissa Mays posted a video last week of her bath water, which had turned from yellow to a blue-green colour, which gave her family rashes and hair loss.

She invited Mr Snyder and Mike Lee, the Republican senator of Utah, who stalled funding for Flint, to bathe in her "god-awful, burning" bath water which emitted a strong odour.