The water contamination scandal in Flint, Michigan, triggered national outrage and prompted Congress last month to pass a bill rushing

The local regulators who knew about the severity of lead contamination and protected themselves but not the community are facing criminal charges. That’s because a high presence of lead in the blood is associated with low IQs and cognitive problems and can be devastating for infants and children.

Now a massive study by Reuters — based on federal health data from 21 states and broken down by ZIP code — points to at least 13 areas in California with problems as bad or worse than what is now seen in Flint, where 5 percent of tested children have elevated levels of lead in their blood. The national norm is 2.5 percent.

Oakland neighborhood has worst problem

The problem appears worst in the Oakland community of Fruitvale (ZIP code 94601), where 7.57 percent of children had high levels of lead.

Next is the Seaside-Sand City area (ZIP 93955) east of Monterey, where the rate was 7.44 percent.

Nine ZIP codes were in the Fresno area, which has already had a lead scare this year, as CalWatchdog reported in August. The results were worst in Selma, 15 miles southeast of Fresno (ZIP 93662), where 6.62 percent of children had high levels of lead in the their blood.

The last two California communities with lead contamination problems worse than Flint were in Los Angeles County.

In south-central Los Angeles (ZIP 90011) in an area east of the 110 Freeway and south of the 10 Freeway, the rate of children with elevated lead in their blood was 5.28 percent.

In the Rosemead-South San Gabriel area (ZIP 91770), the rate was 5.17 percent.

The federal health statistics are mostly based on blood samples from at least 500 children in each ZIP code for five- or 10-year increments ending in 2015. California did much better that most of the 20 other states whose data was studied. In total, 278 ZIP codes had much worse lead problems than Flint, with the biggest concentration in industrial centers in the Midwest and in areas with a history of heavy mining.

Flint fits that profile. But its problems were at the least exacerbated by city officials’ 2014 decision to stop bringing in water from the Detroit system in favor of a switch to cheaper local sources, including the heavily polluted Flint River.

When lead contamination problems are found in the United States, the problem is usually exposure to lead-based paint, especially in older housing, and from old water pipes.

Official misconduct in Fresno endangered residents

Such pipes caused the lead scare in Fresno earlier this year, but official misconduct was part of the problem. In January, after many reports of discolored water, Fresno officials began reviewing how the city water agency dealt with complaints. They discovered that a water official named Robert Moorhead had failed to pass along as many as 1,400 complaints from 2005 to 2011 about problems with water from the treatment plant in northeast Fresno that he managed. Moorhead, who was fired for undisclosed reasons in 2011, has denied wrongdoing.

But a subsequent city probe found evidence of excessive lead in pipes in 51 of the first 280 homes it inspected, or 18 percent. Eventually, city officials warned residents of the 93710, 93720 and 93730 ZIP codes that they could have pipe problems and thus potential exposure to excessive lead.

But the Reuters study should offer some relief to residents of those ZIP codes. None were found to have Flint-level contamination rates.

Problems were first publicly revealed in January after public complaints about discolored water. This led Fresno officials to review how the city dealt with complaints and whether it had complied with laws requiring water issues be reported to state regulators.

This review led to a grim discovery: A former city water official kept hidden several hundred complaints from about 2004 to 2011, raising the prospect that thousands of young Fresno residents among the city’s half-million population may have been exposed to lead poisoning growing up, which can cause cognitive problems that persist for a lifetime.

Mayor Ashley Swearengin, City Manager Bruce Rudd and public utilities director Thomas Esqueda outlined what they had found at a grim news conference last week. They said Robert Moorhead — who ran the water plant in the northeast part of Fresno where water complaints have been most common — had kept complaints to himself on his private computer and personal cellphone.

By law, Moorhead was required to pass along the complaints to the State Water Resources Control Board. City officials said he was also supposed to inform his boss, at the least. Instead, he kept quiet about an estimated 150-200 annual complaints for seven years until his firing for undisclosed reasons in 2011. The reason for his silence may have been his apparent failure to make repairs to his water plant in 2005 despite direction to do so from his boss.

Moorhead, however, told local media that he was being made a “scapegoat” for decisions made above his pay grade. He said he was responsible for the water plant, not water distribution, and that he had done his job well.

Lead contamination in 18% of examined homes

The revelations have triggered alarm in the city’s northeast neighborhoods. So far, the city has found evidence of lead contamination in 51 of the 280 homes it had inspected as of late July — about 18 percent. The problem has been fixed in 11 homes.

Problems in Flint appear far worse. A federal state of emergency was lifted Sunday for the Michigan city, but problems with water supplies remain, and there is vast public anger over a contamination problem that began in April 2014 when local officials began using cheaper water from the polluted Flint River instead of water from Lake Huron delivered by the city of Detroit’s water department 70 miles to the south. Up to 45 percent of households in the city of 100,000 had water with dangerously high levels of lead. There are also concerns about children exposed to lead in water at local schools. Nine officials face criminal charges for not disclosing the problem.

The state of emergency was lifted after Virginia Tech researchers reported considerable improvement.

One of those researchers, Marc Edwards, along with Vernon Snoeyink of the University of Illinois are leading the independent investigation of Fresno’s water woes.