Tennessee looks to Kentucky for example of how to plan rural water lines

When Tennessee legislators saw that Gov. Phil Bredesen had budgeted money to run a water line "up a mountain in Warren County for residents who don't have water, tempers flared as legislators demanded to know why one county got money when others needed it, too," Sheila Wissner reports in The Tennessean of Nashville.

Rep. Mike McDonald of Sumner County, just north of Nashville, "gathered more than three dozen signatures on a bill that would have authorized the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to develop a statewide water plan and loan fund to help communities extend more water lines. It would have been patterned after the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority, which requires all projects using state or federal funds to be vetted through an organized chain of local and regional councils. The bill didn't pass this session, but McDonald says he'll push the issue again next year." he told Wissner, "We need a statewide comprehensive plan to get water to people, and then we wouldn't have these arguments."

A study the department did for McDonald in 2004 "estimated that 5 percent of Tennessee households didn't have municipal water. It would take 18,470 miles of lines to get water to 112,000 households, at a cost of $1.7 billion, the study estimated," Wissner writes. "The study did not delve into the number of households with no clean, reliable alternative water source. That number remains unknown. The problem is most evident in Middle and East Tennessee, where well drillers fight the rocky terrain" and drill dry 10-20 percent of the time.

Sometimes, existing wells go dry. That happened to Tammy and Wayne Blatt, who live on a farm near Carthage in Smith County. In photo above, by Shelley Mays of The Tennessean, Tammy Blatt washes dishes outside near the drums of water her family must buy and haul twice a week, at considerable expense.