We have a lot of threats to the water supply. And we have lots of really good professionals in the water industry who see themselves as protecting the public good. But it doesn’t take much for our aging infrastructure or an unprofessional actor to allow that protection to fall apart.
Dr. Jeffrey Griffiths
Professor of Public Health, Tufts University
There is a lot to sort out before we will know exactly what happened to Flint’s water supply, but here is the bottom line: America’s civil engineers deliver billions of gallons of safe drinking water every single day, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year, decade-after-decade; we know how to do that. However incendiary and distracting the politics surrounding the use of emergency managers to rehabilitate failing cities, this was a failure of professionalism; specific, identifiable individuals did not do their job.