LANSING – Heads will soon be rolling at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality where officials failed to follow proper treatment and testing protocols when Flint moved from the Detroit water system to drawing from the Flint River and took too long to fix the problem once they discovered their error.

Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant said his staff in the Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance thought they were using the right protocols in testing Flint water, but he removed the head of that office in the wake of Governor Rick Snyder calling for an independent review of the state’s actions in the situation.

But legislators from the region, and a water quality expert who has helped to test some of the Flint water, chastised state and federal regulators involved for trying only to preserve their own reputations when trouble with the water system began to emerge.

Wyant said DEQ staff made honest mistakes in how they handled the water source switch.

“It recently has become clear that our drinking water program staff made a mistake while working with the city of Flint. Simply stated, staff employed a federal protocol they believed was appropriate, and it was not,” Wyant said in a statement announcing he had appointed Jim Sygo as interim head of the drinking water office. “The water testing steps followed would have been correct for a city less than 50,000 people, but not for a city of nearly 100,000.”

Liane Smith, the former head of the drinking water office, has been reassigned within the department.

“It’s an issue of leadership going forward given that this is a very difficult issue, and it’s an issue of experience with corrosion controls and a recognition that we needed stronger leadership in that role to address both of those,” Wyant told Gongwer News Service.

“Jim has more leadership experience – and this issue is going to require leadership – and we will identify corrosion control expertise that we will bring to the table,” he said.

Wyant said Smith would remain with the department and be given other duties “as assigned,” but also that her long-term duties in the department could depend on the outcome of the third-party after-action review.

Sygo will lead the office temporarily, with a national search planned to find a new director.

Wyant said he would also be reviewing his own connections with his management staff.

“I do have to look at my own policies to be sure I’ve got a mechanism to identify these issues and flag them sooner,” he said.

But he said the issue in Flint is being addressed now. “We feel we have an action plan in place that addresses lead exposure both the long term, intermediate and short term,” he said.

Wyant said his staff apparently did not have the experience with corrosion control needed to know how to properly monitor the system, but he also put some of the fault on the federal standards.

“I’m coming to the conclusion there needs to be some changes to the federal rule to allow us to be more protective of public health,” he said.

Marc Edwards, a professor at Virginia Tech and an expert in drinking water corrosion controls, said documents he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed state officials should have known the city had to implement corrosion controls and instead worked to cover up the issue.

He pointed out several emails from earlier this year where officials said a corrosion study on the system was warranted but should not be started because the city would again change its water source before the study is completed.

“I think it started innocently enough. … It’s possible that they didn’t understand the federal rule,” Edwards told Gongwer News Service. “By early 2015, this problem became too big to ignore. … Even if they did not understand the rule, they should have taken much more aggressive steps to get this problem fixed.”

To Wyant’s offer to work with federal officials to improve the rule, Edwards said there is room for such improvement, but the current rule should have prevented the issues faced in Flint.

“The rule in fact did require them to have corrosion control,” he said. “The rule does require them to take samples and, if they had done that correctly, people would have been told much sooner there was a proble

Mr. Edwards said he had talked to Wyant on Monday and had agreed to Wyant’s request for assistance.

“I will do whatever I can to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.