Bringing the Wonderful Back to Wild and Wonderful with Clean Drinking Water

Emmy Rinehart

In August of this year, a small West Virginia town finally has drinkable water after 17 years of waiting. O’Toole, WV had been under a boil advisory for nearly two decades. 

Unfortunately for the rest of the state, access to clean water continues to be a struggle. A study released in September of this year compiled all of the violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act within counties from 2016-2019. What they found was shocking. 

They found that 36 counties were ranked within the worst-third in the nation when looking at violations of this act. Worse yet, all but 13 fell in the worst-third of the nation when it came to the amount of time that they were in violation of this act. 

Unclean drinking water can cause diseases like cholera, typhoid, diarrhoea, dysentery, polio, and hepatitis A. Because this is such a wide-spread problem within the state, veryone living in WV has the potential to struggle with finding clean drinking water. 

West Virginians on Twitter have repeatedly sounded off about clean water concerns and questions they have about how the state is handling things.

No water is safe to drink in WV or swim in and don’t breath the air that’s polluted too. I have extended family there & they all got cancer. Every single one.

— Democracy loving girl (@democrzgirl) September 27, 2019

WALLS!! Hell you won’t be able to drink the water in WV because the mines are now allowed to pollute the drinking water. Just like @GOP polluted the water in Flint, MI. All you talk about are WALLS!

— Maw #Resister 🌊🌊🌊 (@MawResister) September 27, 2019

My ex was in oil and gas. We lived in Fort Worth, TX when it was booming. They used up all the oil so we moved to WV—to a town DECIMATED by pollution – Parkersburg, WV, where DuPont poisoned the water for 30 years. Then to Marietta where it was the same. Polluted. It’s SO SAD.

— Laura Miers (@LauraMiers) September 17, 2019

But the hope for clean drinking water in WV could become reality soon. This September, it was decided that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will give more than $26 million to the state to support initiatives to assess hazardous waste, implement air pollution control programs, clean up brownfields sites, improve the quality of water in many bodies of water, as well as develop new drinking water systems.

In November of this year, the EPA will begin sampling water at an old mining equipment manufacturing site in Minden, West Virginia after it was added to their National Priorities List of Superfund sites in May. This new EPA money could help do things like this in other West Virginia cities across the state to determine what the needs of each site would be for clean-up. 

In a state that touts being wild and wonderful, these initiatives are a good way to start putting an emphasis on the wonderful so that West Virginians  can all enjoy the wild while increasing their quality of living.