COUNTRY MUSIC STAR TYLER CHILDERS WILL BE IN INEZ, KY SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22
Tyler Childers, who is from Lawrence County Kentucky, will be there to deliver 500 cases of water to the citizens of Martin County from noon until 3pm at the Inez Community center.
The Martin County Water District became the biggest example of water reliability and quality control problems in Eastern Kentucky after an outage in January left thousands of residents without running water for days. Many of the residents continue to report days-long water outages that force some families to collect rainwater for bathing, and some post videos on social media of brown and discolored water flowing out their taps.
“It’s a big deal for someone like Tyler Childers to help raise awareness,” said Jimmy Don Kerr, chairman of the Martin County Water Board. “I think he has a real passion for the water situation.”
Childers, from Lawrence County, has emerged as one of the most prominent musicians to come from Eastern Kentucky in recent years. He’s played at some of the nation’s largest music festivals, including Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. Earlier this year, Childers won the Emerging Artist of the Year Award from the American Music Association.
The water district’s problems were featured earlier this month in a Herald-Leader series called Stirring the Waters, which investigated why many in Central and Eastern Appalachia still lack reliable access to clean water. In Martin County, for example, the water system loses nearly three out of every four gallons of water it treats as it travels through leaky pipes. In response, some state and local officials have called for increased regulation and accountability of water districts.
The district has received approval for two grants totaling nearly $5 million dollars to improve its service lines, and to upgrade its treatment plant, but those improvements are only a starting point, officials have warned. Meanwhile, the average water bill in the county is increasing about 44 percent.
BarbiAnn Maynard, a Martin County resident and member of the Martin County Concerned Citizens activist group, said Childers has followed the county’s water troubles through a Facebook group called Martin County Water Warriors, where residents share information about water outages and quality problems. Since hearing about his visit to Inez, people from other Eastern Kentucky counties have reached out with offers to bring even more water on Saturday.
“If more people that had a following would reach out and do a little thing like this, we could be doing a whole lot better,” Maynard said. “He picked a very good cause. Being from Louisa, those are our neighbors — it’s good to see our neighbors thinking of us.”
Photos courtesy of: Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com
