Millions of Americans lack clean tap water. Can the US close the gap by 2040?
Rosa Runyon has lived her entire life inside the “water gap” — emptying the rain barrels she positioned beneath her gutters to use later to wash her clothes, and hauling home water from a nearby spring for cooking, bathing and drinking. That’s how she lived for decades while raising her children.
When Runyon, 81, and her husband moved into their current home in McDowell County, West Virginia, the couple had to lay their own pipes to bring “mountain water” from an abandoned mine to their home.
“In the summertime, we worried about it going dry because you know when it gets hot-like, there’s no water,” she told Straight Arrow. When the unburied pipes froze in the winter, her husband would have to climb up the hill with small torches to melt the frozen water — even at the age of 83.
And Runyon is not alone.
Data shows that in entire swaths of West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and the Navajo Nation, a total of nearly 2 million Americans lack access to running water. But the number could be far greater: DigDeep, a non-profit that helps bring water into homes without it, estimates the number of Americans living in the water gap could be as high as 10 million.
“Traditionally we think of this problem as a lower-income problem. It’s also a middle-income issue,” said Travis Foreman, director of the Appalachia Water Project for DigDeep.
And more people need to be made aware.
“Anecdotally what we hear from many of the utilities that we speak with is that they don’t even know how many people within their district or within their county, if we’re talking to elected officials, don’t have running water,” said Julie Waechter, DigDeep’s chief program officer.
What happens when a family doesn’t have access to safe drinking water?
The average American family with plumbing spends $1,100 a year on water provided by their city or county, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with the $16,000 DigDeep estimates is spent per household in the water gap.
“Hauling water requires a lot of physical labor, logistics, planning and a working car,” said Shanna Yazzie, who lives on the Navajo Nation. “You have to figure out when you’re going to get water, and that might mean leaving work early and getting your pay docked, or pulling your kids away from homework so they can help you haul water. It’s stressful.”
READ MORE: Inside the Texas water crisis pitting residents against industry
In the Navajo Nation, some community members live within walking distance of a clean water source, said Yazzie. But, many live 30 to 40 miles from the closest water container.
“And it’s a rugged, rough road,” she told Straight Arrow.
In parts of West Virginia, many drive 30 to 40 minutes for water, spending $300 to $350 on gas each month just to get water, said Foreman. And that bill is only increasing because of the war in Iran, which sent gas prices surging this spring. Now, families who need to haul water are able to buy less water since more of their budget is spent filling their gas tank.
Equally challenging is that for those buying water, bottled water prices have also increased. That’s because the plastic bottles that hold water have also become more expensive: plastic production relies on many different chemical ingredients that originate in the Middle East; those, too, have been stuck on ships unable to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite jobs as teachers and police officers, some working families who live near water lines can’t afford the hookup, Foreman said. So, they continue hauling water, many getting it from a filling station with “terrible water quality,” which can lead to illnesses.
The trickledown effect is measurable: “They have higher medical bills, they have higher dental bills. They have to miss work due to illness or having to haul water for their families. Children miss school having to help their parents haul water or collect water,” Foreman said.
In Runyon’s West Virginia neighborhood, she said at least half of her neighbors have died of cancer, including her husband. She wonders whether the water could be to blame.
“I know it’s a possibility,” Runyon told Straight Arrow, “but we can’t prove it.”
Why doesn’t the US government track water access?
“Over the past centuries, as our country was built, we recognized the importance of the investment into the basic infrastructure for a country — railroads, highways, water access, water systems — and that was seen not only as a fundamental way to build a country, but also an economic investment in those regions,” Waechter told Straight Arrow.
But, Waechter said, “we got to a point in our country, I think, where there was this idea that we’d reached most people, and that was good enough, and unfortunately those remaining without water access were a bit invisible.”
And that visibility matters.
“The United States should know how many people living in our country, our own citizens, don’t have the basic right of water access,” says Waechter. “And the reality is that we don’t know that, and that’s an area that we’re trying to raise awareness about.”
Currently, there is no comprehensive federal system for tracking whether Americans have reliable running water.
“Since 1990 we’ve been systematically removing questions about water in your home, toilets in your home,” said Kabir Thatte, DigDeep’s vice president of policy and external relations. In 2016, the question about whether a household had a working toilet was removed by the Trump administration from the 2020 Census.
READ MORE: Low snowpack, early melt triggers alarm bells for farmers, drought managers
“Some of the data that’s out there, we know to be incomplete or inaccurate. The reality is simple: We cannot solve what we do not measure,” said Shelby Kinlichee, who recently led a door-knocking pilot for DigDeep to count homes without running water or flushing toilets.
States, too, must start collecting their own data, said Thatte, who points to Washington State as a model worth watching.
“They made it a public health issue around affordability,” he said. ”And they commissioned the report to understand how water affordability will impact residents of Washington State in the future, and that came from the public health side rather than the water side.”
What will it take to solve the water gap?
There also must be communication between agencies that work on water, like the EPA, and those in health and other sectors, like the USDA, he said.
It’s one of the reasons DigDeep helped found the three-year-old Vessel Collective, made up of organizations across the water, sanitation and health sectors, often called the WaSH sector.
Last month, the collective announced that, for the first time in American history, there is a goal to close the water access gap by 2040 — a move that could help the U.S. generate more than $200 billion in economic value in the next 50 years, according to DigDeep.
“It’s within a period that families who’ve waited for far too long can actually look forward to a real goal,” Thatte told Straight Arrow.
To hit that goal date, Thatte said, water gap visibility needs to increase. One step is the newly unveiled a water gap map launched in partnership with Michigan State University.
“We’ve been inspired by other industries,” says Thatte. “It’s amazing that rural electrification was able to happen in under 20 years. It is amazing that broadband is happening in even less of a time with a similar budget. And our question at the end of the day is why not for water?”
In addition to the millions who have no access to water inside their homes, another 42 million Americans may have plumbing, but the water that comes through their pipes isn’t safe for drinking. Then there are those on well water who have nothing in the proverbial tank after years of record drought. In 2024, the EPA and American Water Works Association estimated it would cost $1 trillion to replace and repair all the aging water and wastewater infrastructure systems in the country.
DigDeep is working to bridge the gap in the Navajo Nation as well as in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, West Virginia and Kentucky, where the organization is currently collaborating with six counties and local utilities. In Fayette County, West Virginia, the collaborative effort recently helped connect 51 households to waterlines. There are 50 homes left in that project, which is expected to wrap up by the end of the year.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Foreman. “Five or 10 minutes from a National Park and these folks have never had access to clean drinking water.”
While Runyon and her husband had tried since 1998 to bring water to their West Virginia neighborhood via their county government, it took DigDeep four months.
Those first drops from the tap changed her life.
“I cried when I got the water in here and I turned it on,” she said.
Round out your reading
- People are overdosing on GLP-1 injections. What does that look like?
- Researchers put chatbots in a simulation. Grok ended the world in 4 days.
- Fearing more e-bike injuries, Illinois looks to become 10th state to mandate registration, insurance.
- Why are young professionals facing such a tough job market? Hint: It’s not just AI.
- We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
