![]() ![]() There are an estimated 6 million lead service lines bringing drinking water to Americans. Drinking water laced with lead, a neurotoxin, has been linked to health issues including brain and kidney damage, especially for young children and pregnant women.Įven beyond these geographical hot spots, corrosive pipes are a widespread problem. Lead, in particular, has loomed large in recent water crises in places like Flint, Newark, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. Decades-old service lines that lack interior protective coating become old and corroded, and are the primary cause of lead and chemicals leaching into water. While most drinking water in American is safe, some of the pipes that water travels through are not. The people who needed information about what was in that water couldn’t get it.” Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. I saw this as a data problem, as well as a problem of inequity and class. “After Flint, people were marching in the streets and treating it like a political problem,” Avant says. with more lead in their water than in Flint.) Two weeks after her father’s funeral, she launched her company, Aquagenuity, to provide consumers with information on water quality across the country. ![]() ![]() She discovered that there are over 3,000 locations in the U.S. (Avant declined to state the name of the town where he lived so as not to denounce one municipality, but rather to draw attention to the pervasiveness of water quality issues. “I wondered: How many people are exposed to chemicals because they’re in their water?”Īvant’s father passed away in June 2017 due to kidney complications. “That’s when it became personal to me,” she said. There wasn’t a clear link to her father’s sickness, but the discovery got her thinking. But then she found a study that linked the level of arsenic in the local drinking water to a host of health complications. What especially troubled Avant was that neither her dad’s diet nor his lifestyle had changed before the diagnosis. A former NASA statistician and recording artist, her dad was an influential figure in Avant’s life-from him, she inherited her left-right brain merge, Avant, a data scientist and singer, says. In Black-Owned and Proud, we profile innovative Black entrepreneurs building businesses and bringing much-needed change to the face of enterprise.ĭoll Avant was researching the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, in 2016, as CEO of Water Transit Solutions when her father was diagnosed with diabetes. Black business owners and workers too often face systemic biases: from underrepresentation in the boardroom to higher rates of unemployment. ![]()
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