Nothing like a little panic to get Essex County Democratic officials and Gov. Phil Murphy to rally together and confront a long-festering crisis.

Needing money and an escape hatch from the Newark lead water crisis — a Flint Water Crisis 2.0 that is garnering national media attention — Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr. declared Monday that the county will finance the replacement of 18,000 lead pipes in Newark, at no cost to homeowners.

And where will the city suddenly find this manna from heaven? The county will raise $120 million by selling bonds through the Essex County Improvement Authority — which, we heard DiVincenzo brag several times, enjoys a triple-A bond rating. A pretty arcane thing to brag about when the level of lead in drinking water nearly tripled beyond acceptable level.

Newark will have to pay all this back somehow, and those details, like most of this soon-to-be-rammed-through proposal, have yet to be ironed out.

One thing not yet decided is an official name for the bond. How about "the Essex County-Newark Emergency Face-Saving Bond Act of 2019?"

"This challenge was too important to ignore,'' DiVincenzo proclaimed with a straight face as he announced the bailout. If anything, the county, Newark and the Murphy administration found themselves in this dilemma precisely because the issue of Newark's lead-tainted water was either ignored or given short shrift for decades.

When pressed on that point, DiVincenzo, flanked by a tense Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and an uncharacteristically unsmiling Murphy, offered: "It's not what we are going to do in the past, it's what we are going to do in the future."

But the past record in dealing with the chronic water problem in Newark does not inspire much confidence in the future.

The problem, city officials have long claimed, isn't the source water streaming into the homes in the western half of the city from its Pequannock treatment plant.

The real culprit is the aging, lead-encrusted pipes that connect the homes to the trunk lines.

When the city tinkered with the acidity level in the water several years ago, it weakened the effectiveness of a special agent injected into the water that reduces corrosion in the lead pipes. Soon lead was leaching, causing its levels in drinking water to soar. City officials reacted with a we-got-this-under-control reassurance and resorted to a series of short-term fixes. Last October, officials distributed 38,000 free water filters. And another phosphate sealant was pumped into the system earlier this year.

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But what was largely a local issue began to draw national attention when the federal Environmental Protection Agency tested three homes earlier this month, revealing spiked levels of lead in two of them and raising doubts about the soundness of the free filters.

That prompted the EPA to demand that the city and state distribute bottled water to residents until further testing was completed. Some 220 home have been tested, Baraka said. He didn't disclose the results.

Meanwhile, thousands of Newark residents are commuting each week to four distribution sites to pick up free bottled water, like refugees in their own hometown, and wondering how long their children have been drinking poisoned, city-managed water.

"NEWARK'S WATER IS ABSOLUTELY SAFE TO DRINK'' was the message posted on the city of Newark website in April 2018.

"The issue wasn't that it was ignored; the issue was denial,'' said Yvette Jordan, a Newark schoolteacher and member of the Newark Education Workers caucus, which is party to a 2018 Natural Resources Defense Council lawsuit asserting that the city violated federal water protection rules.

The nagging water-lead problem is nothing new. And neither are negligence and indifference.

Newark Mayor Sharpe James, who doubled as a powerful state senator, brought state budget negotiation to a standstill in 2001 when he demanded state funding for the Newark arena.

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Yet nary a word from James about water problems, despite a 2001 NRDC report that "tap water tests revealed lead levels that exceed the national action level."

His successor, Cory Booker, revamped the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation as a public-private agency that was later pillaged and hampered by a kickback and bribery scandal.

Booker, now a 2020 candidate for president, was never implicated, but Linda Watkins-Brashear, the agency’s former director, was one of eight people charged and is now in federal prison, according to published reports.

"I am fully aware that it didn't start with Baraka," Jordan said. "He inherited this."

Jordan is "ecstatic" that the pipes could be replaced in 24 months as promised — unlike a smaller-scale state-funded project last year that was slated to take eight years.

But history has a way of repeating itself, and she has little confidence in Baraka's point man at the water department.

Kareem Adeem, the $130,000-a-year acting director of the department, lacks a college degree and served four years in federal prison for conspiracy to sell cocaine, a New York Times report said.

Jordan said Adeem lacks both managerial experience and the technical expertise to manage the water system, let alone help oversee a massive public works project. Adeem, who was at Monday's news conference, retains the full support of Baraka.

And Jordan worries about the cost. Will homeowners ultimately pay the bill through higher property taxes and higher water rates? Maybe that is one of the things DiVincenzo and Baraka can explain in the future.