When destitute small towns mean dangerous tap water
KEYSTONE, W.Va. — Donna Dickerson’s heart would sink every time she’d wake up, turn on the faucet in her home and hear the pipes gurgling. Sometimes it would happen on a day when her mother, who is 86 and has dementia, had a doctor’s appointment and needed to bathe. Sometimes on Thanksgiving or Christmas, when family had come to stay.
“It was sickening and it disrupted everything,” she said. “Out of nowhere, the water would be gone, and we’d have no idea when it’d be back.”
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While failures of big city water systems attract attention, it’s small communities like Keystone, West Virginia, that are left unprotected by destitute water providers. Small providers rack up roughly twice as many health violations as big cities on average, an analysis of thousands of records over the last three years by The Associated Press shows. In that time, small water providers violated the Safe Drinking Water Act’s health standards nearly 9,000 times. They were also frequently the worst performers. Federal law allows authorities to force changes on water utilities, but they rarely do, even for the worst offenders.
“We’re talking about things that we’ve known in drinking water for a century, that we have an expectation in this country that everybody should be afforded,” said Chad Seidel, president of a water consulting company. The worst water providers can have such severe problems that residents are told they can’t drink the water. For ten years Dickerson and 175 neighbors in the tiny, majority Black community had to boil all their water. That length of time is nearly unheard of — such warnings usually last only for days.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was signed into law in 1974 and initially protected Americans against 22 contaminants, including arsenic. Half a century later, evolving science has broadened the coverage to more than 90 substances, and strengthened standards. The miracle is that most water systems keep up – 94% of them comply with health standards.
After years of problems, Keystone finally got hooked up to a new water system last December. Deteriorating water mains were replaced. A nonproft called DigDeep helped pay to connect homes to the new infrastructure. When a water utility doesn’t treat water properly or has high levels of a contaminant, states are supposed to enforce the law. They give communities time to fix problems, and often they do. If there is intransigence or delay, a state authority can escalate action and impose fines.
Yet in many towns, that doesn’t go well; there is no money to pay the fines. Some places struggle year after year.
