Steve Brock sprays mud off his driveway with a pressure washer on a blue-sky, sunny March afternoon.
Brock, a retired iron worker originally from Michigan, has been busy digging out a French drain around his home in Thorpe, a community in the town of Gary in McDowell County. He said a water leak from the town’s pipes has caused flooding in his basement, so the drain prevents more damage.
Since moving to his home in 2023, Brock said water has been an issue. Sometimes it comes out of the faucet clear. Other times, it’s rusty or even brown.
“It’s like a box of chocolate in Forrest Gump,” Brock said, holding up his jar of brown water. “You don’t know what you’re gonna get.”
Brock isn’t alone.
During the 2024 election, Mountain State Spotlight went to McDowell County to ask people what they wanted to hear candidates for offices talking about. From front porches to a community center meeting over pizza, the message was the same: water.
And two years later, it’s still a problem.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection reported it would cost $287 million to fund high-priority projects in just four of the state’s southern coalfield counties, including McDowell.
Matthew Fullen, a mine engineer, lives up Gary No. 9, a hollow that once hosted a coal mine. He said he can’t own white clothing because every time he washes it, he runs the risk of staining.
When asked if he drank the water, Fullen smiled and shook his head.
“I wouldn’t even let my dog drink it,” he said.
Water issues in McDowell County and across southern West Virginia became front and center during the 2026 Legislative Session. Delegates from the coalfields, namely Del. David Green, R-McDowell, and Delegate Adam Vance, R-Wyoming, worked on several bills to get more money to their districts for water.
Green initially agreed to work on a $250 million proposal for southern counties, but reduced that to just $10 million after finding he couldn’t get any support among his Republican colleagues. Vance separately tried multiple times to get another $10 million for water projects, but Republicans voted it down.
For 19-year-old Katelynn Jordan, a college student from McDowell County, water is a primary reason she decided to run for the House of Delegates as a Democrat. She said if she were elected, she’d shed more light on the issue to get more funding from the Legislature.
“I think that if we get their stories out there and really try to get across how severe of a problem this is, then we’ll be able to get clean water bills passed,” Jordan said.
The problems with McDowell County’s decaying infrastructure stretch back decades and are well-documented.
No one probably knows that more than Mavis Brewster, the director of the McDowell County Public Service District. When the district was created in 1990, it served fewer than 600 customers. But as small systems — set up by the coal companies, then left to communities when they pulled out — failed, the district took them on.
Today, they serve 3,500 customers, Brewster said.
“When they (coal companies) turned those systems over at that time, they might have been 20 years old,” Brewster said. “Well, now look at the age of them. So the systems are totally failing now, and there’s no money.”
Money is the root of the problem.
Many water customers in McDowell County live in poverty or are retired and live on a fixed income, so raising rates is difficult. Help comes from state and federal government dollars. But the whole state applies for the same pot of money. McDowell doesn’t always get it.
And now, Brewster said her district might be taking on another failing system, the Gary Water Department. While a deal is in the works for the city to retain ownership of the system, the district would assume operations.
Brewster said one bill she tracked during the session could’ve helped her district in this very situation. Submitted by Green, the bill would’ve opened up funding and support for a utility taking over another that is struggling.
Lawmakers killed it.
“It would’ve helped,” Brewster said.
Green said, in an email statement, that the water crisis is a multi-layer problem. Not only is money needed, but there needs to be qualified personnel to run systems, expedited processes to intervene with failing utilities, more coordination between state and local agencies and better access to state and federal funds that already exist.
With the session now over, Green said he’s putting work in ahead of the next one to get legislative fixes underway.
“What I’d do differently is actually what I’m doing right now — building consensus with the House, the Senate, and state agencies. This problem is bigger than just a bill, bigger than what 60 days can put together,” he wrote in an email.
Even in Welch, where the water is usually better than other areas of the county, people don’t trust the water. At Latin Appalachian, a restaurant in downtown, waitress Rayvn Walker asks customers if they want it bottled or in a cup.
Owner Robert Diaz said he filters the water he serves in glasses and keeps it in a jug cooler.
“I’m not gonna let someone drink water that I wouldn’t let me or my kids drink,” Diaz said.
Diaz, who lives in the town of Kimball, calls drinking from bottled water “a way of life here.” And he doesn’t find it acceptable.
“Third World countries are getting better treatment of projects and funding to get fresh water,” Diaz said. “This is a dying county. It really is.”
Like the last time Mountain State Spotlight visited McDowell, distrust of Charleston runs deep.
“The state just ends at Charleston,” Fullen said, referring to the death of bills for clean water in the last session. “Nothing ever comes to the southern part.”
Sherman Pat McKinney, a police officer and chair of the McDowell County Republican Executive Committee, is running against Green in the GOP Primary. He said addressing the water situation is going to take more than just a few bills in the Legislature getting passed.
“It’s just a wide-scale thing that a quick fix of a couple million dollars is not going to fix,” McKinney said. “A lot of this is going to be getting the West Virginia Legislature to come together as a body to put political pressure on the federal congressional delegation to do something, because it’s going to take federal money.”
Earlier this month, Charleston came to McDowell in the form of the Public Service Commission. They hosted a hearing on the Gary water situation. Brock brought his brown jar of water to the meeting.
“That meeting down there, I’m going to call it a pacifier,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”