Lt. Cmdr. Melissa de Vera remembers returning home with her sister after school to notices hanging on her family’s door. And like many others her age in the area, she remembers those notices telling them not to drink water from the faucet, stating it was not safe for consumption that day.

“There were a lot of us coming home to these notes and just not really understanding what they meant,” de Vera said. She grew up in Fallon, Nev., which she says is known for having elevated levels of arsenic in the water.

“It didn't hit me till years later that also was really, really odd and probably not very normal for a community to have notices like that,” she said.

De Vera says memories of those notices left behind on her door and a lack of public education in what those notices meant are what gui

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