Mending Unequal Water Justice

Mending Unequal Water Justice. 
By Hope Taylor-Guevara, Director of Clean Water for North Carolina, April 21, 2006 

When Karen Brooks of West Gastonia learned that her drinking water well was contaminated with drycleaning solvents, she and her neighbors, living in small houses near a shopping center with potentially two contaminated sites, had very few options. With advocacy from her county Environmental Health Director, public water lines were extended to the neighborhood, but with most residents on very limited incomes, the $2,000 for hooking up to the system was beyond reach. The most vulnerable folks, including Brooks, who is handicapped, were offered help by local officials to hook up early, believing that they would be reimbursed when the state’s Dry Cleaning program approved the sites for its clean up program. Others simply had to wait. The residents and public officials who had worked hard to get them safe water quickly, were stunned to learn that any hookups before official approval were not eligible for that reimbursement. Residents are faced with the possible loss of water service if they can’t pay.

Dozens of times a year, such scenarios play out across North Carolina—because there is no law or regulation that ensures that safe drinking water is a human right for all of us. The state has  only a patchwork of very limited and specific clean up programs with lots of hoops for residents with contaminated wells to jump through in order to get safe water. 

More than two million of the state’s residents depend on private wells every day for drinking, cooking and other uses. We (yes, that includes me) want to believe that our tasty groundwater is the best we can get, and we assume that it’s safe from a wide range of pollutants that public drinking water systems test for on a regular basis, but most of us just don’t know. 

On average, the wealth and income of rural residents in NC is substantially lower than for urban residents, who are usually supplied by public water systems. Add to that a long history of public water systems, even in cities like Raleigh and Winston-Salem, that have by-passed low income neighborhoods and communities of color to supply water to new and wealthier suburbs, and you have the makings of significant discrimination in access to safe water.

If you’re a lucky well-user, you know the background of land use in your area and you aren’t close to old underground storage tanks (there are over 9,000 registered contaminated sites from tanks in NC), to heavy applications of pesticides that leached down into groundwater from old orchards or fields, to intensive livestock operations that can leave a legacy of nitrate pollution that can be lethal to babies, or even an accidental toxic spill. If you’re even luckier, you don’t live in one of the many areas of our state where groundwater is likely to have high levels of natural arsenic, radium or radon. How would you know?  Almost no one tests for these contaminants and only a handful of our counties require such tests or even provide affordable access to testing.

As Clean Water for North Carolina has found in working with communities across the state, people with the lowest incomes are the least likely to know of nearby contaminated sites or other possible threats to their water, the least likely to test their private wells or know how to get state or local agencies to help with testing, and the least likely to get access to a safe replacement water supply when contamination is found. There’s not even a requirement that toxic sites documented in state files be reported to well users or to the county officials who could notify them and be sure their water is tested.

2006 is the year to protect the right to safe water for NC’s vulnerable well-users. There is a productive and affordable solution to this problem that is gathering momentum, and, with help from you and all your NC neighbors who depend on well water, we can make it happen during this year’s legislative session—a bill that would create an Emergency Drinking Water Fund, provide access to testing for current and new wells, and require notification of known contamination problems. This important set of proposals was introduced last year as House Bill 1701, and it may be evolving into something even better. We’re hoping that new provisions now under discussion would fully fund “well programs” in Health Departments in all 100 NC counties (currently only 35 have such programs and many are very limited in their requirements) to provide notification of nearby contamination, thorough inspections and assistance with well testing for the most likely contaminants. 

Real estate and homebuilding interests are concerned about the testing for fear it will hold up the pell-mell pace of development and sales, or lower property values near contamination. It’s critical that we let our legislators know that property values are more at risk if contamination is allowed to spread for decades unknown and, even more important, that there should be no contest between property values and the right to safe water for protection of public health.

Representative Bernard Allen and his Beechwood neighborhood, in an “extra-territorial” jurisdiction of Southeast Raleigh, learned the hard way about all of these issues. An African-American community in a rapidly growing area, Beechwood remained dependent on wells while new developments all around them were hooked up to city water. When solvent contamination showed up in wells within a few hundred feet of their neighborhood a decade ago, no one encouraged residents to test their wells or even told them about it. In 2003, when contamination was found in over a dozen Beechwood wells, bottled water was provided to some residents while the site was bounced around between state programs in Water Quality and Division of Waste Management, falling through the cracks for clean-up action. With persistent and powerful advocacy by local minister Jerry Price and community residents, Raleigh officials extended public water lines and helped to find grants to lower the high cost of hookups.  But it’s a moral outrage our most vulnerable communities are left to fight these battles for safe water on their own.  As a result of this tragedy and hundreds like it, Rep. Allen made a promise in 2003 to introduce the legislation that became H1701.

Well contamination affects every county and every legislative district in North Carolina—there are thousands of wells even in urban counties like Mecklenburg, Wake, Forsyth and Guilford. Speak up this year to ensure right to safe drinking water for all North Carolinians, including those who are most vulnerable to environmental injustices of many kinds because they are poor, are communities of color or live in rural areas.

Hope Taylor-Guevara is the Executive Director of Clean Water for North Carolina.  CWFNC is a non-profit organization based in Asheville NC that has worked for clean, safe communities and workplaces across North Carolina since 1984.

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