Addressing Potable Water Scarcity in Appalachia

[00:00:02] >> Don't think about it right we just take it for granted that we turn on our tap and water comes out we can drink we can bathe we can cook with it it's not a problem. Currently in America about 2 million Americans lack access to in-home drinking water and here that doesn't even account for the people who have in-home drinking water but don't think that it's safe or don't trust it or have some questions and so the issue that I'm really looking at is here in Appalachia how people deal with drinking water that they don't think is safe and where they go for alternatives. [00:00:34] We noticed that people were getting water from these roadside springs, these are totally unprotected unregulated almost what you would call raw environmental water. If you have water at home that you can't trust to be healthy or to meet your needs this is a valuable commodity you can go somewhere and get water for free and the fact that people keep going that they've been going their entire lives speaks again to how valued this resource is. [00:01:06] The thing that I've been most surprised by is that people who visit these springs often visit them at least once a week and sometimes collect upwards of a thousand gallons so when you think about how much effort the gas costs the time cost of going and collecting water from these sites that's a huge investment people are making. [00:01:27] Now our questions are really centered around what kind of risks does it pose to someone if they're collecting w