Virginia's Rye Valley Water Authority Mum For 11 Months About Water Gone Bad
In Virginia, the Rye Valley Water Authority is being accused of going almost a year before telling the public that its water had gone bad. The Bristol Herald Courier reports on how that's got the whole community of Sugar Grove up in arms.
Michael Ward stood up at a community meeting to declare he had diarrhea eight times last year – a peculiar public announcement, but one met with gratitude by dozens of his neighbors, who had squeezed into a muggy gymnasium for the June gathering. Ward was expressing their commonly held fear – that their drinking water had been making them sick for months.
That angry community meeting came after a June 11th notice by the Rye Valley Water Authority telling people that coliform bacteria was in their water. In the "boil water" warning, the district said the danger could extend for the next 18 months advised that “In July 2008 Rye Valley Water Authority began noticing changes in our untreated or raw water testing results.”
The newspaper explained the danger this way:
Found naturally in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, coliform is used as a standard measure of fecal-matter pollutants in drinking water. Its presence in the Rye Valley system indicates that surface water might have infiltrated the water source, which is an underground spring, and quite possibly brought along other parasites such as giardia lamblia and cryptosporidium. Those parasites can cause diarrhea, headaches, even death in the most severe cases.
The boil water order caused some local restaurants to close. The Bristol Herald Courier has more on the controversy.
