Following hot on the heels of a damning report by a British newspaper about the state of water regulation in America, comes the latest in increasingly worrying reportage on the crisis.

An astonishing 5,300 water systems in America have violated the EPA guidelines on lead and copper, putting 18 million Americans unknowingly at risk.

How Did it Get This Serious?

The creaking, aging infrastructure that supplies the water is a known problem.  The cost of replacing it is too high, and so repairs are carried out piecemeal, when a localized problem becomes serious enough.  To safeguard the millions of people drinking the water, tests must be carried out to check for unsafe levels of dangerous contaminants, and this is …