Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 103 samples. The average for the past week was 6.20.
One of Flint’s peculiar problems has been the large number of residences with astronomical lead readings. This got me curious: the average lead levels in Flint’s water seem to be under control, but how about the number of outliers? Is that going down? The sample size here is necessarily small, but the answer seems to be: apparently not. In fact, the number of very high readings has been going steadily up: