Rockcastle Creek flows past residential homes and
businesses along Route 3 in the town of Inez, the county seat of Martin
County, Ky. A giant coal sludge spill in October 2000 contaminated the
county's rivers for miles, and locals still don't trust the water.
Rich-Joseph Facun for NPR
Aleigha Sloan can't remember ever drinking a glass of water from the tap at her home.
That is "absolutely dangerous," the 17-year-old says, wrinkling her nose and making a face at the thought.
"You
just don't touch that tap water unless absolutely necessary. I mean,
like showers and things — you have to do what you have to do. But other
than that, no," she says. "I don't know anybody that does."
Sloan
sits on the couch in her family's cozy two-story house, tucked back
along winding rural roads in Huntleyville, Ky., near the West Virginia
border. Her mother, BarbiAnn Maynard, 41, is in the kitchen, emptying
out a plastic 5-gallon jug that she uses to fetch cooking water from a
local spring.
"You take it for granted until you don't have
it," Maynard says about a clean water supply. "I think that's the
attitude of a lot people right now, but I don't think they understand
how close they are to it happening to them."
BarbiAnn Maynard walks between the headstones at her
family's cemetery, pointing out her grandparents and her cousins. Her
deep roots in Martin County are one reason she says she'll never leave,
despite the lack of a reliable supply of clean drinking water.
Kat Lonsdorf/NPR
Americans across the country, from Maynard's home in rural Appalachia to
urban areas like Flint, Mich., or
Compton, Calif.,
are facing a lack of clean, reliable drinking water. At the heart of
the problem is a water system in crisis: aging, crumbling infrastructure
and a lack of funds to pay for upgrading it.
On top of that, about
50 percent of water utilities — serving about 12 percent of the population
— are privately owned. This complicated mix of public and private
ownership often confounds efforts to mandate improvements or levy
penalties,
even if customers complain of poor water quality or mismanagement.
