McDowell County residents have reported “black, filmy tap water as they rely on bottled water, costing over $100 a month,” said Jennie Smith as she told lawmakers about failing and contaminated water infrastructure during testimony earlier this month.
“Families, especially in Indian Creek, face contaminated water with cancer cases rising in the community.”
Smith, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition Executive Director, told the House Energy and Public Works Committee about the struggles of communities across the southern coalfields that grapple the most with contaminated water sources and aging infrastructure, resulting in decades-long boil water notices and — more recently — weekly water distribution events.
“Everyone should have access to safe drinking water,” Smith said.
But tens of thousands of West Virginians across the state lack access to clean drinking water.
As the legislative session ticks by, lawmakers are moving measures that could worsen water quality instead.
In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 public water systems in West Virginia had health-based violations, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Last week, the House of Delegates passed a measure that would allow West Virginia’s rivers and streams, currently categorized as drinking water, to be re-classified, allowing laxer pollution discharge limits for companies. Earlier in the session, the Senate approved a bill that would change the state–required inspection of devices that prevent the contamination of clean water supplies from every year to every three years.
And on Friday, the Senate passed legislation that would roll back some of the remaining protections of the Aboveground Storage Tank Act.
That law originally required the roughly 42,000 aboveground tanks in West Virginia to be registered with the state, meet strict safety standards and be subject to inspections by the Department of Environmental Protection. It was unanimously passed in 2014 in response to the Elk River chemical spill earlier that year.
The chemical leak at Freedom Industries near Charleston left 300,000 people without clean drinking water for days after the spill contaminated the public water supply.
On the Senate floor last week, Sen. Joey Garcia, D-Marion, recalled how the air smelled of licorice on the day of the chemical spill.
“I remember where I was Jan. 9, and I remember that I don’t want to be there again, and the only thing this bill does is weaken those standards, and it’s not the right path to take,” said Garcia before urging the chamber to vote down the measure.
Over the past decade, the strong protective standards established by the 2014 measure have been chipped away by lawmakers at the behest of the state’s industry. In both 2015 and 2017, the legislature passed industry-backed bills that rolled back protections implemented in the original measure and exempted thousands of tanks from the safety law.
Now, the act only regulates about 11%, or 4,500, tanks in the state, which would fall to less than 9% under the proposed bill, SB 592.
If passed by the House, the bill would exempt more than 1,000 oil, gas and coal tanks from required evaluations and inspections by the DEP and a certified third-party as currently mandated.
More than 800 of those exempted tanks are located in what’s known as the zones of critical concern, which are areas along waterways that are closest to surface water intakes. These tanks are also more at risk of contaminating drinking water if they have a leak or spill given their proximity to the water intake.
“All this bill does is it corrects the overreaction,” said Sen. Chris Rose, R-Monongalia, referring to the Aboveground Storage Tank Act during his remarks on the Senate floor on Friday. He said the industry responsible for the 2014 chemical spill will still be regulated under the remaining tank standards.
“This bill will do nothing to harm our fresh water sources, but what it will do is help our industry have some regulatory burden took off of them because they have enough to deal with from the federal government already,” said Rose, chair of the Senate Energy Committee.
The tanks that would be exempted under the proposed legislation accounted for 38% of confirmed leaks over the last three years, DEP Deputy Secretary Scott Mandirola told the Senate Energy Committee last week.
While environmental and advocacy groups have been opposed to any roll back to the original 2014 act, this latest effort has sparked particular outrage over its proposed exemptions of tanks in the zone of critical concern, especially given past legislatures inclination to maintain those protections despite similar efforts.
“Here we are in 2025 with a legislature that is willing to gut the entire bill,” Clay County resident Angie Rosser told a crowd of roughly a dozen people as part of an unofficial public hearing in front of the House chamber organized by several environmental and advocacy organizations in opposition of the bill.
Rosser, the former executive director of WV Rivers, added that “If we’re exempting tanks in zones of critical concern, we might as well not have an Aboveground Storage Tank Act at all because it is a shell. It is a ruse. There is hardly anything left that people are keeping an eye on.”