Editor,
When my wife and I moved to Carroll County in 1987 I asked a local where the county dump was located and was told to pick a spot. Locals had been dumping their trash in hollows along roads forever. If you didn’t have your own hollow, you found one and filled in someone else’s hollow.
Eureka Springs had a sewer system that was full of leaks that had polluted the groundwater for as long as the town had been a town. The famous springs were fouled and those leaks fed into Leatherwood Creek and the White River which would become Table Rock Lake. Waste from poultry farms was allowed to leach into the groundwater of rural Carroll County, and the Berryville Tyson plant had contaminated the groundwater that thousands relied on by dumping effluent into a creek that had stopped running on the surface and was running down into cracks in the limestone shelf.
Those affected were forced to stop using their wells even for irrigation, and required to hook onto the Carroll Boone Water District line.
We began distilling our drinking water and around that time the EPA began leaning on states, counties and municipalities to clean things up. To a great extent it worked.
Our current Republican congress wants to not only slow down the system that creates new regulations but gut those in place and defund monitoring of environmental cleanups.
We will have a chance to vote in November 2020. Until then we can send our message to our representatives every single day. We will call, write and fax at least once a day. You work for us not your big donors. Do your job.
Mark Eastburn