Life without water in West Virginia

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Melissa and Thomas Harper realized their 2-year-old toddler, Braylee, was very ill Friday morning when her temperature spiked and she started moaning. Usually, they run a cool bath for her, but the water service that supplies their home had told them the night before not to use water from their faucet.

The Harpers live in West Virginia, just outside Charleston, where a lack of safe tap water has taken its toll on almost every aspect of life for hundreds of thousands of people, from the mundane, like eating at a restaurant serving a limited menu on paper plates, to the serious, like nursing a toddler with a fierce fever. 

Braylee suffers from a weakened immune system, and that means a trip to the hospital every time she has a cold or fever. 

“When you’re treating a sick child, you want to put them in a cool bath,” Melissa Harper, who lives in Elkview, a middle-class Charleston suburb, told Al Jazeera. But that wasn’t an option Friday morning. “Water is the kind of thing that you don’t miss until you don’t have it,” she said.

So the Harpers took Braylee to the Charleston Area Medical Center Women’s and Children’s Hospital, where, Melissa Harper said, the staff “thought I was there because of the water crisis.” 

In the hours after authorities announced tap-water restrictions for nine counties on Thursday evening, hundreds of people flooded local hospitals, worried that their health was at risk after having a glass of water or a bath. Although there were widespread reports of rashes, area hospitals admitted only a few people in the first hours after the leak was announced. As usable water returns, the toll has remained low. 

Monday night, as officials started lifting the tap water restrictions in parts of downtown Charleston, Harper was eagerly awaiting a return to normality in her suburban town of 1,222 people. 

She kept an eye on a website set up by West Virginia American Water that showed areas where the utility felt levels of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, or MCHM, the polluting chemical, had dropped enough that humans could again drink the water.

At about 9 p.m., American Water lifted the ban on the Harpers’ area, and Melissa Harper began flushing out their home’s plumbing, following the water company’s instructions (PDF).

American Water wants customers to flush water in stages and in different locations, a strategy that the company says will avoid overloading the water network. 

Harper says she looks forward to having clean drinking water on tap and getting through the nine loads of laundry that piled up during the days without water. 

Elsewhere in the Charleston area, people are still missing tap water and continue to rely on bottled or free water distributed through the Federal Emergency Management Agency by municipal authorities.

In Racine, a rural enclave some 20 miles southeast of Charleston, a steady stream of cars keeps arriving at the volunteer fire department to pick up pallets of bottled water.

While tap-water restrictions remain in effect, the limit is two pallets per car per day.

Local residents, from the elderly to middle-school students sprung from classes because of the water crisis, are participating in the distribution effort, directing traffic and hauling water rations to a line of waiting cars.

Lt. Jamie Smith, 41, a towering 6-foot-6-inch volunteer firefighter, told Al Jazeera there have been eight to 10 volunteers at the station around the clock since the restrictions were announced.

“I haven’t left since this started,” said Smith, estimating they had served about 3,000 people since Friday. Volunteers have been taking water to the sick, elderly or bedridden when called.

“The Bible says the life of the flesh is in the blood, and right now the life of the flesh is in water,” said Larry “Rocky” Nelson, the fire company’s 73-year-old chaplain. “Right now, water’s more precious than gold.”