Michigan sues companies that ‘botched,’ worsened Flint water

FLINT, Michigan — Michigan’s attorney general filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday against two water engineering companies, saying their negligence caused and exacerbated Flint’s lead-tainted water crisis and demanding what could total hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Veolia and Lockwood, Andrews &Newnam, also known as LAN, were sued in Genesee County Circuit Court. The firms already are facing suits from Flint residents over the disaster, in which improperly treated water from the Flint River scraped toxic lead from pipes into tap water.

Houston-based LAN — whose Flint office in 2013 and 2014 helped the city of nearly 100,000 switch to the Flint River as its primary water supply after decades of buying treated water from Detroit — was accused of professional negligence and public nuisance. Veolia, a French multinational corporation, faces the same allegations along with a fraud count.

Veolia was hired in 2015 after Flint began encountering numerous water problems but, according to the suit, it and LAN didn’t detect the lack of a corrosion control chemical and instead recommended the addition of a chloride that made the problem worse. “In Flint, Veolia and LAN were hired to do a job and failed miserably,” Attorney General Bill Schuette said at a news conference in Flint. “They basically botched it, didn’t stop the water in Flint from being poisoned. They made it worse.”