West Virginia

are they regulated as a public utility?

I live in PA and we have the equivalent here, Pennsylvania American Water, and they're regulated as a Public Utility. Inspections and water quality standards are pretty strictly enforced here. I would like to think that monitoring at the pumping station would have automatically shut down intake when this occurred.

As an aside, my wife's family has a long history in Barbour County. I've been there several times. It's as beautiful as the day's long, but the limits that the geography has and the ability to change industries from coal/lumber to any other industry is very limited. Once you get outside the river beds where most of the rails are, the ability to transport goods is pretty difficult. That's (in my opinion anyway) a big reason why coal and lumber is still the major industries there. That's not to say the whole region is not changing. Take a look at the I-79 corrider around Clarksburg and the development there and you can see that not all of West Virginia is what is depicted and thought of by many.