THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

It turns out that not only did Governor Snyder know the drinking water for Flint was full of slow poisoning lead, but the e-mail trail shows that he also knew that the water contained the fast acting diseases like Legionaires.

Michigan state officials were aware of an increase in Legionnaires’ disease cases and a possible tie to Flint’s troubled water supply at least 10 months before Gov. Rick Snyder informed the public of the situation last month, newly obtained emails show.

The emails, obtained through a public records request by Progress Michigan, a liberal advocacy group, indicate that county health officials were concerned last March about a wave of Legionnaires’ cases, and were at the time raising the possibility of a connection to the city’s switch to a new water source, the Flint River.

“Essentially,” the county health officials are “putting up the flare” and asserting that the “uptick in cases is directly attributable to the river as a drinking water source,” said an official at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in an email to his state colleagues March 13.

Mr. Snyder, a Republican who has faced the harshest criticism of his tenure for his handling of the crisis in Flint, announced Jan. 13 that the state had concerns about whether the water supply might be connected to an increase in cases of the disease, which can be fatal.

A spokesman for the governor said Thursday that he had not been briefed by his aides on the issue until January, shortly before he made his public statements on it.

“He took action promptly and released the information publicly,” the spokesman, Dave Murray, said.

Concerns about Flint’s water have largely focused on the presence of lead. Since Flint, a shrinking city of fewer than 100,000, switched its source in April 2014 to save money, the water has had rising, dangerous lead levels as well as unsafe levels of fecal coliform bacteria. After extra chlorine was added to treat that bacteria, levels of a contaminant from extra chlorine also increased.

But at the same time, the emails suggest, county health officials were noting another problem: a wave of Legionnaires’ disease cases.

Real nice piece of work that Gov. Snyder. Public whipping would be too good for him. But even though in his world government is meant to be ineffective, it is hard to understand why he would take this route at all. There was never any chance he would kill them all.