[throwasehasdwi]

Lead levels are only elevated in certain areas. Getting clean water might be as easy as your neighbor's hose. Flint authorities weren't treating the water properly and it corroded the pipes in some areas. Lead levels were expected to drop as soon as treatment resumed but it spooked everyone bad enough that it doesn't matter if the water is safe, they want new pipes. Lead pipes are not unusual at all in older cities and nobody else has this problem.

I don't see how a single small city whose water supply was tainted by incompetence of local water utilities is representative of the US as a whole. 99.99% of us have access to drinkable water.

[extra88]

No one is talking about the US as a whole but how low it has sunk in some places and/or for some citizens.

Flint is not an isolated case, it's distinctive because it got bad relatively quickly due to clear mismanagement (with a big serving of partisan politics on top). How's this for a headline? "Reuters finds lead levels higher than Flint's in thousands of locales." [0] All it took was searching for "lead worse than flint."

[0] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-...