The enforcement and inspection crews at Maryland’s Department of the Environment are woefully understaffed, a situation that could lead to a Flint, Michigan, style water crisis here, state Attorney General Brian Frosh has warned.
Frosh told the Senate’s Education, Health and Environmental Affairs committee Tuesday that the number of employees in the department’s enforcement sections has dropped significantly since 2015. The problem, he said, is agency wide, but particularly acute in the water supply system.
Citing a May 2021 EPA report, Frosh said Maryland once had a robust drinking water safety program that went above and beyond the minimum federal requirements.
“But now,” he added, quoting from the report, “due to declining resources, increasing demands in the need to make cutbacks MDE may not be able to meet the minimum requirements needed to maintain primary enforcement responsibilities.”
Frosh said the EPA report found that Maryland should have 126 employees dedicated to inspecting the state’s 3,300 drinking water systems but has barely a third of that number. That means those systems only get inspected, every three to five years instead of the recommended 12 to 18 months.
Read more (and listen) at WYPR.
