People noticed problems almost immediately after the switch, complaining that the water tasted and smelled funny. Sometimes it was brown. That's gross. I'd honestly rather have my faucet unexpectedly spew horror movie blood than brown water. Residents were assured it was safe, but tests soon revealed that because the Flint River wasn't treated with an anti-corrosive agent (in violation of federal law), it was eroding water mains, leading to absurdly high levels of iron in the water. It's at that point that city officials ... still said the water was safe to drink.

Not only was that a lie, but the problem was also even worse than anyone realized at first. The pipes leading into about half the homes in Flint are actually made of lead, which anyone who's ever had a tasty paint chip slapped out of their hand knows is a way bigger problem than iron. Unfortunately, no one knew this until a group of researchers from Virginia Tech arrived to do their own tests on the water. This was in August, so almost a year and a half after the city made the switch. That entire time, residents were promised that the water was safe, even if they sometimes had to boil it before they could drink it. The now-former mayor, Dayne Walling, even drank a glass on local television to "prove" there was nothing to worry about.

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He was incorrect, and for more than a year, half the city's residents, including thousands of children, were drinking water contaminated with high levels of lead. The effects of lead poisoning in children include learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and lowered I.Q. Even worse, the damage is mostly irreversible.

For the record, the anti-corrosive agent that could've prevented most of this would've set the city back all of about $100 per day.

Much like the water crisis in Flint, news of the disastrous methane gas leak happening near Los Angeles is just now starting to make headlines. And even then, it's not getting nearly the attention it deserves, given the gravity of the situation. From an environmental standpoint, it's every bit as catastrophic as the BP oil spill that dominated headlines a few years ago, but it's not getting a fraction of the attention that disaster received. That likely has a lot to do with the fact that it's not producing heartbreaking pictures of oil-covered seabirds and such.

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In fact, to see anything at all, you have to use an infrared camera, and even then it just looks like there's a fire burning somewhere.

The Smoke Monster became a real asshole after Lost was cancelled.

That doesn't mean it's not a problem. For one thing, while methane itself isn't much of a threat to humans, the chemicals that are added to make leaks detectable by scent are making people sick. Sidebar: Is there a reason that stuff has to smell like rotten eggs? Is there a reason we couldn't have associated an overwhelming smell of strawberries with gas leaks? If it's going to give kids severe bloody noses, it should at least smell nice.

The bigger concern is the environment. Methane has a significantly greater potential to wreak global warming havoc than carbon dioxide, and the Aliso Canyon leak has been spewing a lot of it into the atmosphere. A recent Time Magazine article estimated that the 1.6 million pounds of methane being released each day have the same environmental impact as driving 4.5 million cars. That's every day. Since October. It's January now, and the most hopeful guesses say we might be able to stop the leak by the end of February.

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Again, you can't see the damage it's doing, but the damage is real, and there's really no way of telling how far it will reach or who will ultimately see the worst of it. The craziest part is how the leak happened in the first place. The underground well that accounts for the source of the leak used to be outfitted with a safety valve. Way back in 1979, that valve was in need of repair. However, because parts were hard to find and the well wasn't deemed "critical" (meaning it wasn't within 100 feet of a road or park, or within 300 feet of a home), the valve was just removed and never replaced. If it was there and functioning, none of this would be happening.

Another deadly import comes in the form of mutton flaps from New Zealand. They're the fattiest part of a sheep and seen as mostly inedible by New Zealand's standards. In Tonga and the countries around it, though, it's considered a staple food in most households.

Another staple: Spam. To Americans, that's bomb shelter joke food that occupies the tiniest sliver of shelf space possible at most grocery stores. Here's what typical store shelves look like in the Pacific islands:

That's a whole lot of canned meat, which is basically all the worst parts of every animal pressed together into a disgusting (albeit sometimes delicious) cube. Along with turkey tails and mutton flaps, this is the kind of shit the people of Tonga live on. Some countries in the region have tried banning the importation of these products, so as to keep obesity from killing the region off entirely. Unfortunately, that would be a violation of World Trade Organization rules, and the Pacific islands want to be a part of that group very badly. Allowing their markets (and only theirs) to be flooded with low-quality meats that kill people are just a necessary evil they're going to have to put up with to make that happen.

I know what you're thinking. "They're literally in the middle of the ocean. Can't they just eat fish?" Sure, if anyone could afford it. Some of the best fish in the world comes from that region, but because the locals can't afford to eat it, most of it ends up being exported to countries like New Zealand. Hooray for fair trade!

The act of drawing oil from the ground produces a lot of waste water. Starting back in the '70s, the Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) made dumping this waste water above ground mostly illegal. However, ranchers in western states, especially Wyoming, argued that they needed this waste water to keep their livestock hydrated. So the EPA put a loophole in place: If oil companies could prove that farmers in the area could make use of the water, they'd be issued an exception that allowed them to dump it instead of injecting it deep underground, where it can't cause any harm (aside from rampant earthquakes in places that never had them before).

Eventually, states took over the decision-making as it pertains to oil company waste water, and most made dumping it illegal altogether. Unfortunately, the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming is still under the jurisdiction of the EPA when it comes to those decisions, and for some reason, the agency that's supposed to protect us from dying at the hands of corporate polluters have allowed oil companies to continue dumping their waste water on this one reservation unimpeded. For decades.

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Unsurprisingly, this constant stream of chemicals is turning the water on the Wind River reservation into a toxic nightmare. Specifically, hydrogen sulfide has turned up in huge concentrations in local sources. When an NPR reporter visited the reservation, one oil company official suggested not spending more than a few minutes at one of their dump sites, because the hydrogen sulfide fumes could very well kill her.

Granted, that detail comes from a story written in 2012. Since then, stories surfaced about the EPA turning over regulation of environmental protection on the reservation to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes who live there, but that was mostly just a technicality in a dispute over air quality monitoring. As of 2015, the EPA was still issuing permits allowing oil companies to dump their waste water on Wind River.

Keep in mind that we're not talking about a tiny piece of mostly uninhabited land. It's the seventh-largest Native American reservation in the United States. It's the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

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It also has enough problems already, even without the poisonous water. Crime is especially rampant in Wind River, with a crime rate that was five to seven times higher than the national average at one point. When President Obama launched an initiative aimed at reducing crime on reservations by flooding them with National Park Service officers, it worked almost everywhere. Wind River was the exception. Crime there increased by seven percent.

As of 2012, life expectancy on the reservation was 49 years. Unemployment was somewhere around 80 percent. Those figures were bad enough to make Wind River a worse place to live than Iraq and Zimbabwe, respectively. Polluted drinking water is the last thing they need.