Nonprofit delivers bottled water again to Gary residents

From Below: Rising Together for Coalfield Justice handed out bottled water in Gary on Thursday, continuing a monthly giveaway that families still depend on while the town’s water system remains under repair. The nonprofit is working with the West Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church’s Water Project, a partnership built to keep safe drinking water moving into McDowell County while the larger fix lags.

Gary’s water problem has already moved through state intervention. The Public Service Commission opened a case on the town’s system in August 2025, found deficiencies in February, and approved an operations and maintenance agreement in May that put McDowell County Public Service District in charge of day-to-day operation of the water system. That gave the PSD a formal role in the fix, but it did not end the need for bottled water distributions.

Brad Davis, a co-chair of From Below, has said the giveaway is not a permanent solution and that state officials should provide water until the local system is repaired. His message echoes the frustration in Gary, where residents have had to keep relying on outside help for a basic daily need while the system moves through state oversight and local management changes.

The church response goes back further than this year’s handouts. In 2022, the West Virginia Annual Conference passed a resolution to create an account at the United Methodist Foundation of West Virginia to help provide sustainable potable water systems for rural communities in southern West Virginia. Davis has also said Keystone, where he serves in McDowell County, had been under a boil water advisory for nearly a decade, a reminder of how long these problems can drag on in the coalfields.

West Virginia United Methodist Church has tied those failures to the region’s shrinking tax base, noting that the decline of heavy industry, especially coal, and population loss has left many southern West Virginia communities with neglected infrastructure after companies went out of business. In Gary, the monthly water giveaway has become part of that larger pattern, a stopgap that keeps bottled water moving while the Public Service Commission order and the McDowell County PSD takeover try to produce something residents can use from the tap.