Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lead contamination in Washington, D.C. drinking water
The current article is terrible, but the topic is extremely notable.  Please compare the version of events I just rewrote over at Marc Edwards (civil engineering professor); that version focuses on Edwards' very substantial contribution to the issue, but there is more out there.  This incident is highly noteworthy: 15 parts per billion of lead is too much for safety.  Above that, and kids get brain damage.  Because the Army Corps of Engineers switched from chlorine to chloramine for water treatment, the lead levels in DC rose to over 1,250 parts per billion.  That's so high that ''the water coming out of the kitchen tap legally qualified as hazardous waste''.  When informed of this, the water authority tried to hush it up, yanking Edwards's funding and getting the EPA to do the same.  The CDC released a report saying there was no health risk—which they later had to publicly retract after a House investigation found it to be, and I quote, "scientifically indefensible".  That was a major black eye to the CDC and caused huge ripples.  Water systems all over the country changed the way they handle chlorination and pipe replacement because of what happened in DC.  Even today, DC is still struggling with lead contamination issues in their municipal water.  There's 44,000 kids in DC that may be permanently brain-damaged because of this incident.  There are academic articles, newspaper articles, books... heck, I found a ''Good Housekeeping'' article about it.  It would be a shame to delete this topic just because no one has bothered to look into it.  I've proposed, per , that the better details at District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority#Controversy be merged into Lead contamination in Washington, D.C. drinking water as a starting point
— User:Macwhiz, 02:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:SPINOFF (Wikipedia:Content forking)