The EPA has yet another 'Oops we did it again' moment

It’s been interesting to follow the water crisis in Flint, Mich. and see where efforts to save a buck have turned to passing the buck.

That city of some 100,000 has horrible problems with its water that began when in 2014 city officials chose to change water sources from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River.

But what has been more intriguing is the finger-pointing and the immediate rush to judgment calling for Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to resign when overlooking one of the most culpable entities around.

As it turns out, one of the big players in this mess is the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA, like many other agencies and efforts started with good intentions. But it has since grown to a monster that sometimes wreaks more havoc than good.

The agency came into being Dec. 2, 1970 when President Richard Nixon signed an executive order that boxed up many regulations Congress had authored over the years. It’s been very successful in large part as arguably our waterways are cleaner and air quality improved.

But as we have found with massive government bureaucracies the connection between the left and right hand — or maybe the left and right brain — seems to be missing some of the time.

And the results can be disastrous, if not tragic.

Turns out that before Snyder was put under the microscope, in June 2015, Miguel del Toral, a regulations manager in the EPA’s ground water and drinking water branch, sent a memo to his agency superiors warning them of “highlead levels in Flint, Michigan.”

City residents had already been complaining or numerous ailments including rashes and hair loss. What’s more, General Motors had stopped using Flint water at its local plant because it was corroding engine parts.

But regulations kept an organization that is supposed to be entrusted to watching over the health and welfare of people across the U.S. from making this information public. Or so said Susan Hedman, the regional EPA administrator who resigned earlier in light of the problems in Flint that were under her jurisdiction.

As usual an investigation has been ordered and sometime down the road there will be more finger pointing and blame games.

Flint, however, just scratches the surface of EPA missteps.

Henry J. Miller, writing for Forbes Magazine wrote in August of 2015, following the toxic spill of mine tailings into Colorado’s Animas River, called the EPA one of the worst regulatory agencies in history.

It was under EPA’s watch that one of their crews accidently caused a breach that allowed 3-million gallons of toxic mine waste to spill into a watershed that traverses both Colorado and New Mexico.

Miller goes on and notes the EPA is stocked with “disaffected and anti-industry employees,” and is “the paragon of waste, fraud and abuse.”

How else could one explain one of the most outlandish local stories involving Mike and Chantell Sackett who had land at Priest Lake they hoped some day would be site of their dream home?

Innocently moving dirt and rock on that lot fetched federal officials who claimed the Sackett’s were destroying a wetland. The couple was ordered to return the .63-acres back to its original state or face fines of $32,500 per day until they complied.

The Sackett’s sued, took their matter all the way to the Supreme Court and won in a unanimous decision in March 2012. In retrospect, was this not an absolute outlandish waste of everyone’s time and untold amounts of money?

Not all that far from Flint is Cleveland, Ohio, home of the famous — or infamous — once flaming Cuyahoga River. It caught fire in 1969 and became part of the impetus for formation of the EPA. In its early years the agency did great things to improve our environment in a time when factories belched rancid smoke into the air and raw sewage poured into our waterways.

Now, the once well-intentioned EPA elicits the same scorn and fears as do mention of the IRS, TSA and DMV. Smoke appears to have clouded its vision and the damage under its watch is the ultimate of ironies.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.