“Unfortunately, there are certain populations in this country, Black and brown communities, tribal communities, low-income communities, that are seeing the worst aspects of this disinvestment.” Last year, the EPA granted Maryland $144 million to finance water infrastructure projects across the state as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which set aside more than $50 billion to improve drinking, waste and stormwater infrastructure across the country.In the early 1900s, when waterborne diseases like typhoid regularly sickened Americans, Johns Hopkins graduate and engineer Abel Wolman co-developed a way to determine the most accurate amount of chlorine needed to treat drinking water.“The city has always prided itself on good drinking water, because of the way it was originally designed,” said Natalie Exum, an environmental health scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.“So where we see sinkholes or water main breaks, those are areas where we haven’t put the dollars in the ground.” Last September, as residents in Jackson, Mississippi — another majority Black city — were reeling from the collapse of their city’s drinking water system, Baltimore’s own water woes were thrust into the headlines.In a City Council meeting later that month, Jason Mitchell, director of Baltimore’s Department of Public Works, the city’s water utility, said that some of the water lines and valves that were compromised were installed as far back as 1898."