Suspicious of public officials telling them their water was safe, community activists sought assistance from the same group of Virginia Tech researchers who helped expose lead contamination and other hazards in Flint, Mich., drinking water in 2015. They have distributed more than 100 testing kits in the two suburbs, and in 11 of the 17 homes where samples have been analyzed so far, lead concentrations in the first liter drawn from household taps exceeded 5 parts per billion — the maximum allowed in bottled water by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.