Mark Edwards, the scientist who worked on exposing the problems in Flint, MI, was one of my colleagues at Virginia Tech. He seems to be committed to the radical idea that people’s drinking water shouldn’t make them sick.

This piece in Washington Post is one of those “hero’s journey” journalistic accounts that drive me a little bit crazy, but hey. Edwards deserves it. The nice part of the story comes in here:

And then his phone rang in April 2015. It was a woman named Leeanne Walters, a Flint, Mich., stay-at-home mother who was getting nowhere convincing state and local officials that there was something seriously wrong with the orange-tinted water coming out of her tap. Her family’s hair was thinning. Her son’s skin was red and irritated. They told her the water was perfectly safe. And even months later, when it had been determined there were high traces of lead in her water, the officials shrugged it off as an isolated problem.

Desperately, she called Edwards, whom she had read about online. Over the phone, he walked her through how to take her own water samples. The next day she sent them FedEx to Edwards to test. It was the worst lead levels he had ever seen.

“When we saw that my heart skipped a couple of beats,” he said. “The last thing I needed in my life was another confrontation with government agencies. But it was us or nobody.”

First, yay Ms. Walters. Citizen-led science is never not awesome.

Second, though the story highlights lousy behavior and governmental failures on the part of regulatory agencies, included the CDC, which really can’t be doing that. CDC is an agency where nothing less than 100 percent effort towards transparency and accountability is acceptable. Heads need to roll.

But although much of media wants to trumpet just the government failures, ahem. Mark Edwards was educated, his entire life, at state schools–SUNY Buffalo and the University Washington. He’s spent his career fighting for clean water from a *tenured*–not contingent–position at *state* school. He received grant money, though not enough, from the National Science Foundation–a *federal* source of grant funding that some of our friends in Congress buuuuuuuuuurn to cut because it’s just a waste. He disseminated his findings via an internet that the government helped research, develop, and build.

My point is not just to fling more confetti on Professor Edwards, but to point us back to a rather old-fashioned idea: that there is good government and there is bad government, and that good government is possible, and it is often all around us, invisible, and it is sometimes the only thing that is capable of standing up when government itself fails.