Residents Rely On Religious Groups For Fresh Water Supplies

On a beautiful summer’s day in August, a group of people sat under a canopy tent in front of the fire station in the tiny town of Anawalt. Next to them was a 500-gallon water tank and a whole lot of clean one-gallon jugs. 

Anawalt’s volunteer fire chief Joey Fields opened the tank and began filling jugs, in anticipation of the people coming to this water distribution. (Fields is also captain of the Gary Fire Department.)

Like many small towns in West Virginia, Anawalt has a complicated and enduring water problem. Also like many towns in West Virginia, Anawalt used to be a coal town. In the 1940s, coal companies built water systems that carried water to houses inside town limits. 

But as coal companies left, those systems were turned over to the municipal governments in the towns they departed from. By the 1980s, people on city water were experiencing regular outages as old and corroded pipes broke. 

In the early 2000s, the town turned maintenance of the antiquated water system over to the Public Service District, which lacked enough funds to do all the needed fixes at once. Problems persist to this day.

That’s why the United Methodist Disaster Relief Team activates a system of volunteers to bring the 500-gallon tank and a whole lot of clean jugs to distribute water to rural areas in McDowell County. Anawalt distribution is every other Thursday. Diane Farmer and Peggy Bailey are volunteers. They’re also residents who live with a lack of clean water. 

“Water lines are very old,” Farmer said. “And they break down a lot. And some people they don’t have water for certain periods during the day but up Boyd’s Chapel Way, everybody’s on a private well.”

Boyd’s Chapel is outside town limits. Being on a private well doesn’t help much with water woes around Anawalt. People outside town limits used to get clean water through wells or springs on their property, but even that water is unsafe now.

“Out where I live, I’ve lived there I’m 72 and I’ve lived there 70 years, just on a different part of the property and it was okay until about 86, and that was when they started drilling gas wells,” Farmer said.

After that, things went from bad to worse. In the early 2000s, coal companies began blasting again.

Joey Fields recalled some of the issues. “The blasting tore our well up. So when the water’s off any length of time we don’t have any source of water due to a lot of the wells being contaminated by the blasting.” 

Neither does Brenen McGraw. McGraw took a break from putting in a new pumphouse to fetch water from the fire station and chat with his distant cousin Diane Farmer about the upgrades to his private well. Even with new filters on his well, McGraw said, he doesn’t drink from it.

“Ya know, everybody’s got filters around here cause if you don’t you don’t have nothing. But I don’t drink it noways, no,” he said. 

McGraw is knowledgeable about what’s in the water—which is why he won’t drink it. 

“It’s like a bacterial iron, and it’s coming from the coal seams. Sulfur is in the coal. It actually makes the determination on how they sell their coal, how much sulfur’s in it. And the sulfur comes out in the water that’s coming through the coal seams,” McGraw said.

Farmer said she doesn’t believe any of the coal companies working in McDowell County will ever be held to account, past or present.

“These coal companies, they change names often enough of the company to not be held responsible. And I’m not against coal. I’m not. I just want clean water.”

And Farmer was quick to add that the nearby town of Gary was built by coal companies, who supplied the workers with houses and services. The others agree—both that coal is important to their history, and that the coal companies will never be held accountable for what’s happened to their water. 

“We can’t fight the big companies,” McGraw said, after nodding in agreement with Farmer. “The water system is what needs to be. The government should be set up that if there’s a public service in your county that supplies water, that county should be responsible to service water to anyone in that county.”

It turns out, the state has had ample opportunity to remember people in rural areas, with mixed results. Future stories from this station will explore those government responses to West Virginia’s water crisis. And we’ll examine some alternate sources of help for bringing clean drinking water to former coal towns. Meanwhile, if you have potable water piped into your home, count your blessings.