By Zachary Shepherd and Kelsey Paulus for Kent State News Lab.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

In summer 2022, Garrett, Jenny and their young daughter Katie Betts had no potable water in their home in Vinton County, Ohio. The Betts family's house was on the community water line, but they lived about 250 feet up a hill, which is too far for the system's pumps to successfully push the water.

So several times a week, they made a two-hour-long trip to a local water pump to fill the tank in their trunk, which they used to fill a larger, underground storage tank. They've hauled water for more than a decade.

They're far from the only Ohioans struggling to get clean, potable drinking water, says Terri Fetherolf, who runs the department of development in Vinton County. "Some people have to ration water, have to go elsewhere to get water," Fetherolf said. "They haul it in tanks in the back of their pickup trucks and use [it] out of a 300-gallon tank. Depending on the size of their family, it may last them a few days or a week, and then they have to go haul it again."

Fetherolf said approximately 1,700 of about 5,000 households in Vinton County depend on wells or water from elsewhere for basic household tasks.

Getting water to Appalachian communities is challenging and expensive, said Joe Pheil, the executive director at the Ohio Rural Water Association. Residents are spread out in small communities among the hills and it's difficult to pump water up and down. The reason these people and communities are left without reliable drinking water? The cost.

"I've been to pretty large systems over on the western side of Ohio, where everything's really flat ... The whole system has one pressure [zone]," Pheil said. "I've been to other systems down in the Appalachian area that have 19 different pressure zones in order to pump through the hilly terrain."

Water providers "would love for everybody to have access to water," Pheil said, but the logistical challenges would probably lead to high water bills that aren't affordable for the average household. The median household income in Vinton County was about $45,000 in 2020, compared to about $58,000 statewide.

"They're having a hard time maintaining the infrastructure in those communities because the costs are going up," Pheil said. "The residents in those communities can't afford to pay more money." There's one other option - where the federal and state governments step in with funding for water infrastructure, he said.

Since 1987, the Ohio EPA has offered low or zero-interest loans to community water systems to help fund the development of drinking water infrastructure. The state spent $250 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds on wastewater and drinking water infrastructure projects.

But broadly speaking, Pheil said it can be hard to drum up support for grants like this since it can seem like a lot of money for infrastructure that helps relatively few people.

In the meantime, people haul water. The Betts family used a water tank, held down on their flatbed trailer with parallel winch straps. Their storage tank, located on a short but steep gravel drive behind their house, has seen its fair share of problems. They were once left without water during winter for a month.

"It was the middle of winter and I ran out," Garrett said in 2022. "While I was trying to reprime the pump, my line ended up freezing right at the tank." After that winter, Garrett buried the tank underground and hasn't had any issues since, except a few times when the water tank emptied. In those situations, he has to reprime the pump, which takes a few hours.

By summer 2022, hauling water had become a normal part of everyday life, so much so they find themselves not having to keep track of the amount in the tank. Garrett said he typically hauls two to three loads of water every Saturday, which lasts the family a week.

"It's so close, yet so far" to the community water system down the hill in MacArthur, Garrett said. "They talked about [needing] a pump station or a water tower, and we've already offered to donate property to help with that."

In August, Ohio announced a $799,000 grant to connect 52 households in Garrett Ridge, a region of Vinton County near MacArthur, to drinking water. The project aims to extend Jackson County Water Company's service lines into Garrett Ridge.

Keith Solomon, deputy manager of Jackson County Water Company, said this grant money is reserved for the engineering and designing of the project, and any remaining funds afterward will be reserved for the actual construction of the project if it moves forward.

"When the engineering and design work is completed we will be able to present a complete project to the funding agencies," Solomon said via email. "This is a step in the right direction." The Bettses are holding off on making any permanent, expensive changes to their water system in the hopes these grants will soon lead to potable water in their homes.

Garrett said he heard about efforts to fix local water infrastructure over the years - but he's "not going to believe it until it's running through my faucet."

Zachary Shepherd and Kelsey Paulus wrote this article for Kent State News Lab. This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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Missouri's duck-hunting season runs through January, and many enthusiasts are concerned about how plentiful their future quarry will be because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

It's been six months since the high court removed protections for most wetlands in the nation.

Zack Morris is the president of the Conservation Federation of Missouri and said the Sackett vs EPA case dealt with identifying which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act.

This affects the quality of upcoming duck hunts. Morris said without thriving wetlands, the sport won't be able to carry on.

"It's hard to say how many of those unprotected wetlands are going to be plowed under or how fast," said Morris, "but that's certainly, I think, a reality that we'll face is significant wetland loss over the next 10 years or so and declining duck numbers as a result. "

Wetlands are also the primary habitat for 200 at-risk plants and animals in the state.

Morris said most of the ducks that migrate through the Midwest on the central or Mississippi flyways hatch in small pothole wetlands in North and South Dakota, Iowa and Canada.

Duck habitat is expected to decline for the U.S. portion.

Conservation groups in Missouri say protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Dana Ripper is co-founder and executive director of the Missouri River Bird Observatory and said wetlands are critical to Missouri's way of life and Missourians need to reach out to their legislators to gain protections.

Ripper said wetlands protect us from flooding and provide us with clean drinking water. They are key for fish and the millions of ducks and shorebirds that migrate through the state annually.

"They are some of our most biodiverse ecosystems here in Missouri - all throughout the Midwest," said Ripper. "They also provide water filtration. We have had devastating floods just in the last 15 years or so. And our wetlands are really important for helping to mitigate the effects of flooding. "

As many as 127 million acres of wetlands existed when settlers arrived on this continent. Today, more than 50% of those wetlands are gone - and without protection, thousands of acres will be
lost each year in the United States.

Of the original 2.4 million wild acres of forested lowlands in southeast Missouri, less than 60,000 acres, or 2%, remain today.




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States like Illinois are dealing with the fallout of a Supreme Court decision made earlier this year.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively removed federal protections for over half of the wetlands across the country. The case, Sackett v. EPA, dealt with which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act. Conservation groups said in Illinois, protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Paul Botts, president and executive director of the Chicago-based Wetlands Initiative, said the problem needs a congressional fix, but it is unlikely to happen soon.

"Congress, of course, is completely melted down and dysfunctional now, and this issue just simply is not going to rise to the top and cut through the partisan divide that we have," Botts acknowledged. "The chances of the Clean Water Act being updated are just pretty close to nil."

As Botts put it, the Clean Water Act is the reason Illinois waters are no longer on fire or used as open sewers. The landowners from the original case call the ruling a "victory for property rights."

Botts contended both of the state agencies dealing with wetlands in Illinois have a poor track record. He fears many of the state's pristine waterways will return to the poor condition they were in 50 years ago.

"We have an Illinois EPA, and then of course, we have our state Department of Natural Resources," Botts outlined. "Both of those agencies are starved for staffing resources, frankly, to carry out programs and to do things like issue permits in a prompt manner so that landowners can get an answer."

For almost 30 years, the rule the high court overturned served as the underpinning of the Clean Water Act. Along with investments made in wastewater treatment, Botts noted the safeguards afforded by the law resulted in enormous benefits for people and communities. Today, he fears conservation groups will be unable to keep up with the decline of waterways.

"Audubon estimates that tens of millions of acres have been made newly open to development by the Sackett ruling," Botts stressed. "It's just an estimate; it would be years of work to try to go around and use state wetlands inventories to figure out an exact figure."


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An Arizona water expert said the state faces a challenging situation with the Colorado River being overallocated, compounded with what she calls a historic drought.

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said Arizona's water system is in distress.

She explained access to water from the Colorado River depends on what she called a "hierarchy of water rights." Certain Native American communities and farmers enjoy "senior rights," while other towns and cities have to get by with less.

Sorensen noted Arizona is blessed to have significant groundwater aquifers, so management of these aquifers is paramount.

"The water was laid down over tens of thousands of years, and it isn't annually renewed at any significant rate," Sorensen pointed out. "If you pump too much of it, you're basically 'mining' that groundwater and depleting it, meaning that there will be less available for future generations."

While Arizona has taken significant steps to conserve water, Sorensen said the work and innovation must continue, from improving use of reclaimed water to finding ways to augment water supplies. In a poll earlier this year, Arizonans said they believe the state should be doing more to regulate groundwater consumption, as well as prioritizing conservation and restoration projects.

As Arizona continues to grow, Sorensen stressed water demands are much more closely related to land use than to population growth, with the agricultural sector using about 70% of the state's water. She said some crops require as much as six acre-feet of water per acre of farmland. An acre-foot of water equates to about 326,000 gallons.

"Whereas urban developments actually use much less water, probably more like one to two acre-feet per acre," Sorensen stated. "So ironically, as our population has grown and we have converted what used to be farmland into urban uses, there has been a sort of natural water savings."

She added in the future, experts predict Arizona will be hotter and drier, so it is important to understand land use choices are meaningful and will have a direct impact on water availability.


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