When Marc Edwards opens his mouth, dangerous things come out.
Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech, has been investigating dangerously high lead levels in the Flint, Mich., water supply. “The agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem,” he says. “They were the problem. What faculty person out there is going to take on” the government? In 2003 the Virginia Tech civil-engineering professor said that there was lead in the Washington, D.C., water supply, and that the city had been poisoning its residents. He was right.
Last fall he said there was lead in the water in Flint, Mich., despite the reassurances of state and local authorities that the water was safe. He was right about that, too.