"Flint’s Water Crisis and the ‘Troublemaker’ Scientist"

"Marc Edwards took up the cause of water activists in Michigan a year ago — and earned their trust. Now he’s fighting to keep it."

"Near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Flint, Mich., there is an old pump house, the walls of which have long served as a kind of communal billboard. The Block, people call it. People paint messages there — birthday wishes, memorials for the dead. In January, after Gov. Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in response to Flint’s water crisis, a new message appeared, addressed implicitly to Snyder but also to the world: YOU WANT OUR TRUST??? WE WANT VA TECH!!! In the history of political graffiti, 'We want Va. Tech' may sound like one of the least stirring demands ever spray-­painted on a wall, but in the context of Flint, it was charged with the emotion and meaning of a rallying cry.

By 'Va. Tech,' the message’s author meant a Virginia Tech professor of civil and environmental engineering, Marc Edwards. Edwards has spent most of his career studying the aging waterworks of America, publishing the sort of papers that specialists admire and the rest of us ignore, on subjects like 'ozone-­induced particle destabilization' or the 'role of temperature and pH in Cu(OH)2 solubility.' Explaining his research to laypeople, he sometimes describes it as 'the C.S.I. of plumbing.' Edwards is a detective with a research lab and a Ph.D. In 2000, after homeowners in suburban Maryland began reporting 'pinhole leaks' in their copper pipes, the water authority there brought in Edwards. In 2002, after receiving a report that water in a Maui neighborhood had mysteriously turned blue and was giving people rashes, Edwards took on the case."

Donovan Hohn reports for the New York Times magazine August 16, 2016.