Could Flint’s drinking-water crisis be just the tip of the iceberg? A new analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that, last year, more than 5,000 drinking-water systems serving some 18 million people violated the federal law for testing lead levels in their supplies.
Moreover, the problem may be even more pervasive because many more water networks known to have such violations—including Flint’s system—do not even show up as having lead violations in the government database designed to track such water quality problems, according to the analysis by NRDC scientists and health specialists in the June 28 study.