The lead poisoning of the entire city of Flint, Michigan was preventable and should never have happened.
Numerous pundits and industry experts have said this. Most of them, however, explain that if government had functioned properly, the environmental agencies would have properly communicated to their higher-ups and the problem would have been spotted much sooner.
Those with a more cynical view intone that the government in Ann Arbor was not terribly interested in the plight of the largely poor residents of long-beleaguered Flint, a casualty of the Rust Belt Collapse.
I think these experts have it wrong. Open data can help us, the people of the United States, prevent the next Flint. More specifically, real-time, machine-readable, regularly reported open data that is transparent from collection all the way through analysis. Continue…
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