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Who Owns West Virginia's Water? A Cautionary Tale
It took a few days after a state of emergency was declared across nine West Virginia counties and one-sixth of the state's population was told not to drink or bathe using their tap water for the national news media to discover a story of national importance occurring in the political backwaters of Appalachia.
But most haven't yet picked up on what may be the most interesting and important detail: why so many people in this water-rich state depend on a single, privately-owned treatment system and distribution network that sprawls across nine counties for their supply of drinking water.
<snip>
The paper trail of the state's Public Service Commission filings that document the dramatic expansion of WVAWC's water network over the past two decades (see map below) reveals similar stories happening again and again, as the company gobbled up one municipal utility after another, as well as individual homes whose wells were polluted by coal mining activities.
<snip>
The fact that 16 percent of the state's population depends on WVAWC's Kanawha Valley Water Treatment Facility for drinking water is a central factor in the scale of the disaster and, as the PSC paper trail demonstrates, the coal industry has a lot of culpability in that situation as well. But still other factors have led to the expansion and consolidation of WVAWC's service territory, which is why the moral of this story applies beyond coal country.
The West Virginia chemical spill is a cautionary tale for communities all over the country where multinational companies are coming in and buying up municipal water utilities to manage people's drinking water supply for profit. And factors beyond groundwater pollution by the coal industry are driving those trends, such as systemic under-investment in public water systems by federal, state and local governments, and the rapaciousness with which private companies, aided by political favoritism and lobbying, are pursuing expansion of their influence, customer base and profit margins.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-wasson/who-owns-west-virginias-water_b_4611443.html
But most haven't yet picked up on what may be the most interesting and important detail: why so many people in this water-rich state depend on a single, privately-owned treatment system and distribution network that sprawls across nine counties for their supply of drinking water.
<snip>
The paper trail of the state's Public Service Commission filings that document the dramatic expansion of WVAWC's water network over the past two decades (see map below) reveals similar stories happening again and again, as the company gobbled up one municipal utility after another, as well as individual homes whose wells were polluted by coal mining activities.
<snip>
The fact that 16 percent of the state's population depends on WVAWC's Kanawha Valley Water Treatment Facility for drinking water is a central factor in the scale of the disaster and, as the PSC paper trail demonstrates, the coal industry has a lot of culpability in that situation as well. But still other factors have led to the expansion and consolidation of WVAWC's service territory, which is why the moral of this story applies beyond coal country.
The West Virginia chemical spill is a cautionary tale for communities all over the country where multinational companies are coming in and buying up municipal water utilities to manage people's drinking water supply for profit. And factors beyond groundwater pollution by the coal industry are driving those trends, such as systemic under-investment in public water systems by federal, state and local governments, and the rapaciousness with which private companies, aided by political favoritism and lobbying, are pursuing expansion of their influence, customer base and profit margins.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-wasson/who-owns-west-virginias-water_b_4611443.html
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