BY MADISON MOONEY
This is the second installment of What’s the drip? For this article, I will focus on findings that will be presented in the Mountain Drinking Water Project’s community meetings next week. However, before we dive into the Mountain Drinking Water Project, I wanted to share a timeline of how this project got started.
In 2018, the University of Kentucky (UK) partnered with Martin County Concerned Citizens (MCCC) on a water project, the Martin County and Water Health Study. This study focused on testing tap water from homes across Martin County in response to residents’ reported concerns.
The project itself consisted of testing tap water samples from homes throughout the county. The homes were randomly selected. Two researchers visited each home and asked residents if they wanted their water tested. UK researchers tested for a wide variety of contaminants that had been of concern.
Along with the water samples, the residents were asked about their relationship with tap water here in Martin County, including their tap water use at home, questions about health and water quality issues they might have experienced, and how they get their information on water–related issues. During that year, 97 homes were tested.
The following year, MCCC and the UK held a community report-back on the Martin County Water and Health study on Zoom due to the COVID outbreak and the social distancing required.
During this study, the contaminants detected were disinfection byproducts (DBPs), with 35% of the homes having high levels. To learn more about this issue and help our community, the UK partnered with MCCC to conduct a longer study on DBPs.
The Mountain Drinking Water Project officially began in 2020 as a collaboration among the UK, MCCC, Appalachia Citizens Law Center, Headwaters in Letcher County, and LiKEN Knowledge. These core partners helped establish the two communities where this project took place, Martin County and Letcher County. The project recruited residents from both communities to train and collect water samples from their taps once a month. Some residents in Martin and Letcher counties who participated in this project have collected water samples in their homes for 1-2 years.
These water samples created a path of knowledge and awareness about DBPs, helping many rural community water systems throughout the region address similar problems.
This year, the project is officially ready to report back the findings to Martin and Letcher counties. This project’s results will carry into the next phase of water–related work in the community.
I urge all Martin County residents to attend the meetings Nov. 3 and 4 and voice their concerns and questions.
The University of Kentucky staff, who have been studying Martin County’s water system for over eight years, will conduct two separate meetings in Martin County to explain their findings. The first meeting is Nov. 3 at the Martin County Senior Citizens Center in Inez. The second meeting is the following day, Nov. 4, at Warfield Park Community Center. Both meetings start at 5:30 p.m. and end at 7:30 p.m.
The meeting will be livestreamed on the Mountain Citizen’s Facebook page on Nov. 3.
Let’s all learn, grow, and share knowledge and awareness.
Madison Mooney is a community engagement coordinator for Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network.