Smart Talk: Many wonder about drinking water protections after West Virginia spill

What to look for on Smart Talk Thursday, January 23, 2014:

Every single day of our lives we walk to the sink in the kitchen or bathroom and turn on the water faucet. Immediately, we hear and see the clear stream of water. We take it for granted. We’ll always have clean water in our homes.

But what happens when you don’t? Some 300,000 people in West Virginia found out the hard way earlier this month.

An industrial chemical leak into the Elk River in Charleston left residents of nine West Virginia counties without safe water for days. They weren’t able to drink it, cook with it, bath in it or do anything else with the water and had to rely on bottled water or water that was trucked in.

The West Virginia incident left many Americans asking whether it was an isolated incident or could it happen again? How vulnerable are the nation’s and Pennsylvania’s public water supplies? What safeguards are in place to protect water? Were there lessons learned from West Virginia?

Those are questions we’ll pose on Thursday’s Smart Talk to Jeff Hines, the President and CEO of the York Water Company, John Poister, a media spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Southwest Region and Andrew Dehoff, Executive Director of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.

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