EPA chief defends action on Flint water crisis

WASHINGTON — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday she wasn’t trying to deflect blame, but to “simply get all the facts on the table,” when she testified before Congress last month about the federal government’s role in Flint’s water crisis.

In a breakfast meeting with reporters Tuesday, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy repeated her testimony that the primary responsibility for the crisis lies with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and Flint’s emergency manager.

“It was clearly Michigan and the emergency manager that made decisions that didn’t make sense,” she said.

That explanation didn’t fly with some Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee who called on McCarthy to step down when she testified before the panel March 17.

“It was a difficult hearing,” McCarthy said when asked about the resignation demands. “The challenge for me was recognizing that we should be scrutinized and accountable in terms of whether or not we should have seen that there was a problem there despite Michigan’s assurance that there wasn’t.”