By the Wayside...Are They Serious?

By Lynn Thorp, National Campaigns Director (Follow Lynn on Twitter - @LTCWA) Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr. just tweeted that local officials in West Virginia had this to say about planning for chemical accidents and spills:  “That's just something that's kind of fallen by the wayside.” This is horrifying in light of hundreds of thousands of people without water for 5 days, businesses unable to open and people’s health threatened in ways no one quite understands.  But it’s not that surprising.  We take tap water for granted and rely on our Public Water Systems to clean up pollution that ought to be handled much further upstream.  We can’t imagine anything will go wrong because disruptions of this nature do not happen very often.  So planning for emergencies and the unexpected get left for another day.  And yet we know that the unexpected will always happen somewhere. We need to put more emphasis on planning for the unexpected when it comes to our drinking water sources. But we also have to go one better and eliminate these threats where possible.   There are siting decisions, operational decisions and regulatory oversight decisions which we have to be willing to make if we truly think our tap water is important. Rather than letting it fall by the wayside, we need to Put Drinking Water First.