All of these problems are a matter of public record. The author and former businessman Seth Siegel sent them to me recently after we had a discussion about his new book, “Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink,” and I asked him for concrete examples. He could have sent me dozens more, he said, often involving utilities that were in violation of safety standards for years on end.

Siegel argues that the crisis in Flint, Michigan, was part of a much larger problem: Widespread acceptance of dangerous contaminants in our drinking water. “Among other problems,” he writes, “some of these contaminants have been shown to cause cancer and cardiovascular disease, lead to hormonal disruptions linked to long-term health problems, harm children’s brain development, and possibly trigger changes in our DNA that could later affect a child or grandchild.”

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What can be done? The country’s sprawling network of 51,500 water utilities — many of them problematic — should be consolidated. Government agencies, at the federal, state and local levels, should put more emphasis on public health when regulating the utilities. “This is a problem that’s completely fixable using existing technology at affordable prices,” Siegel told me.

Until it is fixed, he recommends that people consider buying a faucet filter for their home or using a filtered pitcher specifically designed to remove the contaminant that their water has. Filtered tap water, as Siegel recently wrote in Time, can be safer than bottled water — largely because bottled water is so lightly regulated.