'Abandonment': Outlook dims for southern WV water funding boost despite mounting need
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.
Standing before fellow U.S. House of Representatives members in a Washington, D.C. conference room, Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., had his staffers distribute jars of auburn-colored water collected the prior week from homes in McDowell County long plagued by failing water infrastructure.
Wielding the microphone during a House Appropriations Committee meeting, panel member Moore reported one jar came from a McDowell County woman who collects water from a natural spring — which she gets to by traveling up and down a mountain via a mule — because she doesn’t trust the water flowing from her own faucet, which Moore said has left the woman with sores and chemical burns.
In the Rayburn House Office Building, Moore reported that, back in the tiny McDowell County community of Iaeger, there’s a woman who keeps an 1,800-gallon drum outside her home to catch…