Sherry Chandler

Clean Water Protection Act

Here’s an item from Devilstower at the Daily Kos that is of interest to us here locally:

Thirty Days to Save the Mountains

For several days in the summer of 1980, I tromped around the Kentucky side of the Appalachians, asking people about their water. I wasn’t doing a taste test, or peddling water softeners. I was preparing an impact statement on a new mine going into the area. There weren’t many houses to visit — a few dozen scattered along a set of “hollers” that cut into the sides of a single slump-shouldered mountain, but it took me more than a week to get to them all, traveling up and down dirt roads that often required me to leave my car next to the highway and walk.

Almost all the people I met there were desperately poor, and most of them were elderly. There were rickety frame houses, tar-paper shacks, and log cabins that had not come from some some factory-produced kit. No more than a handful of them had running water inside the house. Again and again people led me to hand-dug wells or neighboring streams to show me where they got their water for drinking and washing. Two 80-something sisters took me out to see a little spring that peculated from the base of a sandstone bluff. They walked a good hundred yards to get there, carrying a plastic milk jug to collect water. When we got back to their tiny stone and timber home, they showed me pictures of their children — some of them living far away, others dead for years — and offered to fix me supper. The spring water was cold and sweet.

But it didn’t stay that way for long because the mine got approved.

The post asks that we call our Congress Critters to ask them to support the Clean Water Protection Act. Here’s a list of the bill’s cosponsors. From Kentucky, Chandler and Yarmuth are supporters, but no other Representative.

You can find your representative at this link.

Related posts:

The Secret Knowledge of Water

Hey! I run a clean show here!

“Kentucky’s Undeground Economy”

Their Eyes Were Watching God

“sugar-water served with humor”

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