A New York Times analysis has shown that since 2004 twenty percent of water treatment systems in the nation have violated the Safe Drinking Water Act, delivering water containing unhealthful and illegal levels of arsenic, bacteria and radioactive materials.
According to the report 49 million people are affected. To give some perspective on how widespread this problem is and just how incredibly incompetent or negligent the Bush Administration was at enforcing the law: take the U.S. Census bureau’s 2008 estimates of the populations of the three largest cities in the nation (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) and that only equals 15,050,819 people or 30 percent of the total affected.