For many families in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia, the absence of clean, reliable drinking water has become part of daily life.
Based on nearly six months of reporting and dozens of interviews with residents, water district officials and experts, this series has revealed an ongoing crisis in Central Appalachia that has left many families with poor access to clean, reliable drinking water.
▪ Water districts in Central Appalachia struggle to perform routine maintenance, such as repairing leaking service lines, which leads to quality and reliability problems for customers.
▪ Some grant funding awarded to districts cannot be used to address districts’ most pressing issues.
In Kentucky, the Abandoned Mine Lands program has awarded millions to water districts to extend service lines to federal prisons, rather than repairing the myriad of infrastructure problems that disrupt service and quality for customers.
▪ The only real source of revenue for community water systems is by collecting bills from customers.
As more and more people leave West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky — in the last 10 years, West Virginia is one of two states that have lost population nationally — water systems will have less and less revenue.
Some water districts in Kentucky have refused to raise rates even when pressured by the state Public Service Commission.
All but one of those systems have been serious violators with the EPA for the last 12 quarters.
Support investigative journalism Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Will Wright spent months digging through documents and interviewing residents of Eastern Kentucky as he reported "Stirring the Waters" alongside colleagues from the Charleston Gazette-Mail and West Virginia Public Broadcasting.