Some good(ish) news on Flint, MI!
Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones:
Marc Edwards and his team at Virginia Tech have published a new paper that uses a clever way of calculating lead levels in the Flint water supply over the past five years. It turns out that sewage sludge is tested for metal content monthly, and it also turns out that the metal content of the sludge is closely correlated with the metal content of the system’s water supply….
…By October 2014 lead contamination in drinking water was back to its normal, pre-switch level, and by mid-2016 had dropped below the EPA “action level” of 15 ppb. By the beginning of 2017, Flint water was probably cleaner than the majority of municipal water systems in the US.
…Flint appears to have suffered a lead crisis in 2011 even worse than the one in 2014—but nobody knew about it. It was only the sludge testing that revealed it…