Families await running water

KIMPER, Ky. — Several times a day, Roger Thacker hauls 5-gallon buckets of water about 50 yards uphill to his mobile home so his family can bathe and do laundry.

It’s a grueling daily chore that keeps local families like Mr. Thacker’s trapped in a 19th-century time warp, years after the rest of the country stopped considering running water a modern convenience.

About 85 households along an eight-mile stretch called Ridgeline Road have electricity and phone lines but lack running water. The wells on which many once relied for clean water are no longer usable, local residents say, because they have dried up or been contaminated by nearby coal mining.

In recent weeks, water officials began seeking a study and ultimately financial assistance to run water lines to the area, but it’s a lengthy process that could cost nearly triple what it would to run lines elsewhere.

Most families’ ties to the area run deep, and simply picking up and moving elsewhere isn’t an option, said the Rev. John Rausch, who has lobbied for help as director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia.

“In Appalachia, there is a tie to the land,” he said. “Many of these people have lived on this land for many generations. They were brought up there; it’s their way of understanding themselves.”

Most homes are secluded within deep wooded hollows or atop steep hills. From the road, water tanks may be the only signs of habitation.

“You’ve got people who shouldn’t be carrying water in 2007,” said John Doug Hays, deputy judge-executive of Pike County.

Like most families along Ridgeline Road, Mr. Hays blames coal mining for the area’s water woes, saying intense underground blasting in the 1990s caused their wells to crack, allowing water to seep out or contaminants to seep in.

Over the past two years, the state Department of Natural Resources has reviewed 100 complaints involving wells. About 20 percent of those cases were related to active mining operations, said Mark York, spokesman for the Environmental and Public Protection Cabinet, which oversees natural resources.

“We’ll obviously be to blame in certain cases,” said Bill Caylor, head of the Kentucky Coal Association. “You don’t go out to deliberately cause someone to lose their well — it’s an inadvertent byproduct of the mine service.”