By Mike Tony
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Editor’s note: This report was supported by the Pulitzer Center and is part of a Gazette-Mail series on drinking water quality in West Virginia.
Chris Coleman told West Virginia utility regulators the red water was one red flag among many.
Coleman, one of fewer than 1,000 residents in the McDowell County city of Gary, made it clear the city’s sewer utility had given him reason to see red for years at a November 2023 state Public Service Commission hearing at the McDowell Public Library in Welch to take public comment on whether the utility was “distressed.”
For the previous 10 to 12 years, Coleman said he’d been dealing with sewer utility issues, indicating the city sewer system had flooded his basement repeatedly and that Welch city workers had to come out to his home because Gary city workers wouldn’t clean out his sewer.
“[T]here’s multiple other places where all the sewer and stuff runs in the river,” Coleman said. “The water is terrible. It’s either red or brown half the time.”
The PSC later said the 400-customer Gary sewer system had experienced numerous line breaks allowing sewage to flow into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.
In March 2024, the PSC issued an order determining Gary’s sewer operations comprised a distressed utility under Senate Bill 739 of 2020, which allows the PSC to order the acquisition of a failing water or waste-water utility by what the agency deems the most capable “proximate” utility.
The PSC determined the McDowell Public Service District was a capable proximate utility and ordered Gary and the district to negotiate and enter into an operations and maintenance agreement.
But momentum toward that end has stalled in the nearly two years since, evidence of how difficult it has been to change a status quo of rampant water quality concerts and chronic underfunding for water and wastewater utilities throughout West Virginia.
Read the rest of the story at the Charleston Gazette-Mail
