Appalachian History Series – Curtis Crum Reservoir: Martin County’s Lifeline
In eastern Kentucky, on a ridge above the courthouse town of Inez, Kentucky in Martin County, Kentucky, a small earth dam holds back a narrow, tree lined lake. On maps it often appears as “Martin County Reservoir.” In public records and local speech it is simply Curtis Crum. For more than half a century this modest impoundment and its companion intake on the Tug Fork River have supplied drinking water to thousands of people in one of Appalachia’s poorest counties.
Curtis Crum Reservoir was built in 1969 as part of a coal era push to modernize water systems across the Big Sandy region. It was never a massive multipurpose reservoir. A 2025 hydraulic and water quality modeling study describes it as a small, undeveloped lake of about 6.5 hectares, with an estimated usable storage of roughly 370,000 cubic meters, located between the Tug Fork and Inez just upstream from the treatment plant. Water from the river is pumped into the head of the reservoir and mixed with its stored water before treatment, a setup that gives operators some flexibility but also exposes the system to whatever is happening in the river at any given season.
Today Curtis Crum is both a lifeline and a pressure point. It sits at the center of a longer story about rural infrastructure, water chemistry, affordability, and environmental justice in Martin County, told not only through newspaper headlines and advocacy reports but also through the steady trail of technical documents, drone surveys, and peer reviewed science that have accumulated around this one small lake.
Building a Modern Water System in Coal Country
The modern water system that relies on Curtis Crum was assembled at the height of the coal era. A detailed case study in PLOS Water notes that the Martin County public water system was built in the 1960s to serve about six hundred households in Inez and then steadily extended, without major treatment plant upgrades, until it supplied roughly forty three hundred households across the county.
As the system expanded outward along hollows and ridges, it grew in complexity far beyond what its original designers probably imagined. By the early twenty first century the Martin County network contained hundreds of kilometers of pipe, dozens of storage tanks, and multiple pressure zones. Yet it still depended on a single treatment plant just below Curtis Crum and on the paired sources of the reservoir and the Tug Fork intake to feed everything downstream.
State documents and planning studies from the late twentieth century show how Curtis Crum was slotted into a larger regional vision. A 1999 water resource development plan for the Big Sandy Area Development District mapped the reservoir and plant as key pieces in a network of small municipal systems that were supposed to bring treated surface water to communities that had long relied on wells, cisterns, and springs. The dam appears in federal inventories as an earth structure about sixty six feet high with a small drainage area and a limited surface footprint, built for local water supply rather than flood control or power generation. Those early records assumed an original capacity on the order of hundreds of acre feet, but they did not account for decades of sedimentation that would later shrink the reservoir’s usable storage.
In its first decades the system offered what many residents had been promised for years: treated tap water, indoor plumbing, and a sense of belonging to a modern utility grid. The 2002 “Martin County Project” study by faculty and students from regional universities found that by the early 2000s residents already ranked drinking water and environmental health among their top concerns, a sign that the new utility did not fully live up to those early promises for long.
Coal Slurry, Distrust, and the Rise of a Water Crisis
Any history of Martin County’s water has to pass through October 2000, when a coal slurry impoundment failure sent millions of gallons of waste into tributaries of the Tug Fork. Residents lived with discolored, foul smelling water and a long series of regulatory disputes about cleanup, responsibility, and risk. For many households that disaster marked the point when the local drinking water system and its sources stopped feeling safe.
Community driven research in the early 2000s, including the Martin County Project, documented a sharp decline in trust. Survey responses repeatedly named drinking water as the county’s primary environmental problem, ahead of air quality, strip mining, and solid waste. That distrust did not stem solely from a single spill. It grew from years of boil water advisories, low pressure incidents, and chronic leaks that left customers paying for water that often did not reach their taps or did not feel fit to drink.
By the mid 2000s the technical record began to reflect that unease. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Safe Drinking Water Information System, the Martin County Water District received thirty four maximum contaminant level violations for trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids between 2006 and 2017, the second category of federal drinking water violations after total coliform bacteria.
The PLOS Water study notes that at times as much as sixty nine percent of the water produced at the plant was “unaccounted for” at customer meters, a figure that points to severe leakage and water loss. In that context Curtis Crum’s role as a modest storage cushion became even more important. Any loss of effective volume in the reservoir, whether from sediment infill or drought, made it harder to ride out outages or maintain consistent treatment conditions while the system strained to meet demand.
Measuring the Bottom of the Lake
In 2019 the Kentucky Division of Water turned its attention directly to Curtis Crum’s shape and capacity. The Division’s 2020 Annual Report describes a “Martin County Bathymetric Study” that used the agency’s new small unmanned aircraft, or drone, team together with boat mounted sonar to map the lake and its surrounding slopes. Built in 1969 and supplemented by river water pumped from the Tug Fork, the reservoir had never been fully surveyed in this way. The bathymetric work, the report notes, was intended to give state and local officials a clearer picture of how much water the lake could still hold and how much room remained before intake structures would be exposed during dry spells.
The associated StoryMap on the state’s Water Maps Portal walks viewers through the process. Drone imagery shows the narrow, elongated basin reaching back into the hollows, while sonar cross sections reveal how sediment has accumulated in the headwaters. The study team compiled volume elevation curves and capacity estimates, pairing them with maps of the dam, spillway, and intake. For local residents who had long suspected that the “lake above town” was slowly filling in, the bathymetric survey provided technical confirmation and a new basis for planning.
An article in the Energy and Environment Cabinet’s Land, Air & Water magazine framed Curtis Crum as a pilot project for the Division’s drone program, an example of how low cost mapping tools could improve worker safety and reduce time on the water while still delivering the kind of detail needed for dam safety and drought planning. Federal agencies soon picked up the case, citing Curtis Crum in a technical brief on low cost flood and dam monitoring as an example of how bathymetry and new sensors could help small, high hazard dams manage risk.
Together these documents repositioned the reservoir in the state’s imagination. It was no longer just a line item in a dam inventory. It was a piece of critical infrastructure whose exact capacity, intake depth, and hazard rating mattered both for public safety and for the daily work of keeping drinking water flowing.
How a Small Lake Shapes Water Quality
If the bathymetric survey mapped the physical outline of Curtis Crum, a different set of studies has focused on what happens to water once it leaves the dam and heads into the plant and distribution system.
A 2025 modeling paper in the journal Water, led by civil engineers working with the utility and citizen groups, built a detailed hydraulic and water quality model of the Martin County system. The authors describe a system with only one treatment plant, dozens of storage tanks, and very high baseline water loss. Their model assumes the same 6.5 hectare reservoir with roughly 370,000 cubic meters of storage described earlier. Under those conditions, the plant frequently draws on the Tug Fork during summer and early fall, when the reservoir’s limited natural inflow cannot keep up with demand.
The study’s central finding is counterintuitive. Reducing water loss from roughly seventy percent toward an industry standard of fifteen percent, if done without other changes, can actually worsen disinfection byproduct problems in parts of the system. Less leakage means water moves more slowly through the pipes and storage tanks, which increases its “age” by the time it reaches distant taps. As water sits longer, chlorine decays and trihalomethanes can rise toward or above regulatory limits, especially during warm months when the utility is relying heavily on river water with elevated bromide levels.
Those modeling results build on the community engaged health research reported by Jason Unrine and colleagues in PLOS Water in 2024. That team collected drinking water samples at ninety seven homes over a year and found that trihalomethane and haloacetic acid concentrations varied strongly by season and were closely tied to source water conditions and distribution system hydraulics. The study also documented the system’s long history of disinfection byproduct violations and reinforced what residents had been saying publicly for years: data from a small number of compliance sampling points do not fully capture what people are experiencing at their taps.
In both sets of work Curtis Crum recedes into the background as a simple rectangle on a map, but its small volume and limited inflow make the county’s operational choices much harder. When the reservoir is full and drawing mostly on its own stored water, operators can sometimes keep disinfection byproducts lower than when they must lean on more heavily chlorinated river water. When it is low, there is less room for error.
State Intervention and the Workgroup Era
By the late 2010s the scale of Martin County’s water problems had drawn national attention. Articles in outlets such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Appalachian Voices framed the county as a stark example of the costs of rural disinvestment in water infrastructure. Those stories helped bring political pressure, but the more durable record of the state’s response lies in regulatory files and workgroup documents.
The Kentucky Division of Water’s 2020 Annual Report notes that the Division and the Public Service Commission had been actively involved with the Martin County utility since 2002, when an inspection at the main plant revealed serious problems. Over the years state staff dedicated personnel, technical assistance, and funding to help the utility reduce leaks and optimize treatment, particularly around disinfection byproducts. In January 2020 the Energy and Environment Cabinet secretary created the Martin County Water District Workgroup, with a technical subcommittee tasked with issues such as water loss, capital improvements, and the kind of bathymetric analysis carried out at Curtis Crum.
The workgroup portal brings this paper trail together. Meeting agendas, five year timelines, and PowerPoint presentations show how state engineers, local officials, and community advocates debated intake rehabilitation, dam work, and plant upgrades. Bathymetric maps from Curtis Crum appear alongside leak survey maps and construction schedules, reinforcing the idea that the reservoir, the Tug Fork intake, the treatment plant, and the leaking distribution network cannot be treated as separate problems.
At the same time, the utility’s own records began to tell a parallel story. The official website for the reorganized Martin County Water and Sanitation Districts posts Consumer Confidence Reports that identify the sources as the small reservoir and the Tug Fork, summarize regulatory compliance, and provide simple diagrams of the system. Board agendas and capital improvement notices document the slow accumulation of projects: backup intakes on the river, work on the dam and spillway, filter upgrades at the plant, and repeated efforts to replace aging water lines.
A 2018 television story from WCHS-TV described state leaders announcing a package of Abandoned Mine Lands and Appalachian Regional Commission funding that would support a secondary Tug Fork intake, repairs at the reservoir dam, and modernization at the plant. These announcements were early markers of what would become a longer period of emergency intervention and incremental reconstruction.
Affordability, Advocacy, and the Price of Water
Even as technical work advanced, the cost of keeping water flowing climbed. The 2020 report “Drinking Water Affordability Crisis: Martin County, Kentucky,” produced by Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center and Martin County Concerned Citizens, traced how decades of mismanagement, high water loss, and debt had combined with repeated rate increases to make water bills among the highest in the state. It placed Curtis Crum and the treatment plant within a broader timeline that included the coal slurry spill, PSC enforcement actions, and a series of management changes.
An issue brief from Food & Water Watch in 2018, titled “The Water Crisis in Martin County, Kentucky,” similarly highlighted the county’s extreme water loss, frequent outages, and high rates. For national audiences it made the case that Martin County’s story was not a local anomaly but part of a pattern in which small rural systems, particularly in coalfield counties, struggle to maintain complex infrastructure with a shrinking customer base.
By 2024 the U.S. Office of Water had distilled some of these findings into its “Water Affordability Case Study: Martin County, KY.” That case study, cited in the Fordjour modeling paper, reported that the average monthly bill for a typical residential water customer using about 18.9 cubic meters was around one hundred fifty eight dollars, and that nearly half of households paid more than 4.5 percent of their income on combined water and sewer service.
Viewed alongside the state’s technical interventions, these affordability studies underscore the bind in which many Martin County households find themselves. Fixing leaks, rehabilitating a high hazard dam, and replacing lines is expensive. When those costs are loaded onto a small population with low median income, the burden can itself become a form of environmental injustice.
Low Water on the Shoreline
For most of its history, Curtis Crum’s reservoir has quietly done its work out of public view. That changed in the summer of 2023, when front page photographs in The Mountain Citizen showed broad mudflats and exposed banks where local readers were used to seeing open water.
The headline declared that the reservoir was at a “dangerously low” level and quoted officials warning that the lake surface was uncomfortably close to the intake structure. Residents who drove out to look saw tree stumps and sediment bars that had been submerged for years. The visual shock confirmed what bathymetric maps and technical reports already suggested. The margin for error at Curtis Crum was thin.
Earlier Mountain Citizen coverage had used another method to convey the lake’s small size. In 2019, during a period of extreme water loss, the paper reported that the volume of treated water lost to leaks over a single year was several times greater than the reservoir’s entire storage. The analogy was vivid. Each year the system was effectively losing multiple Curtis Crum reservoirs into the ground through broken pipes and unmetered flows.
These local stories are crucial primary sources because they capture how residents experience the technical realities described in bathymetric surveys and modeling papers. For families who have lived with dry taps and boil water advisories, the sight of bare lakebed reinforces the sense that the safety margin is not academic. It is something that can vanish in a single hot, dry season.
Recreation, Memory, and Place
Curtis Crum is not only a utility asset. Tourism and recreation guides, such as a TrailsRUs listing of fishing and boating opportunities in Martin County, identify the “Martin County Reservoir” as a spot where anglers and boaters can launch small craft, fish for bass and panfish, or simply spend a quiet afternoon on the water. In a county with limited public lakes and parks, the reservoir doubles as a rare open water landscape and a small slice of public space.
That dual identity complicates how people talk about the lake. Some residents remember learning to fish on its banks or taking children there to watch the sunset above the dam. Others associate it primarily with outages, notices, and the anxiety of watching the waterline drop. The same body of water that appears in engineering drawings and disinfection byproduct graphs also lives in family stories, church conversations, and local debates about who should pay to keep the system running.
A Reservoir in a Larger Appalachian Story
Curtis Crum Reservoir sits at the intersection of many forces that have shaped rural Appalachia in recent decades. Its construction in 1969 reflected a moment when federal and state programs, often influenced by coal and industrial interests, poured money into dams, plants, and distribution systems that were supposed to bring modern utilities to places long left out. Its later struggles reflect the withdrawal of those same industries, the erosion of tax bases, and the difficulty of maintaining complex infrastructure in communities with limited resources.
Researchers at University of Kentucky and elsewhere have turned to Martin County as a case study for the chemistry and hydraulics of rural systems, from Unrine’s disinfection byproduct work to Fordjour’s modeling of water loss and chlorine decay. Advocacy groups, including the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, have used the county to argue that affordability must be treated as a central part of safe drinking water policy, not an afterthought. National journalists have pointed to Martin County when explaining why clean water can be expensive even in a country as wealthy as the United States.
In all of these stories Curtis Crum may seem like a supporting character. Yet without this small reservoir and its aging earth dam, the county would have little buffer against drought or river contamination. Its constrained volume and location between the Tug Fork and Inez shape how operators run the plant, how chlorine moves through the system, and how residents experience their tap water.
The technical reports, StoryMaps, journal articles, and local news pieces that now surround Curtis Crum do more than document a local water crisis. They offer a detailed record of how one small Appalachian community has tried to understand and repair the infrastructure that ties them to the river and to one another. As new repairs are completed and new studies are published, Curtis Crum will likely remain a barometer for whether those efforts are working and for how much burden rural households are asked to carry to keep their taps running.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Division of Water. Annual Report 2020. Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2020. https://eec.ky.gov
Kentucky Division of Water. “Bathymetric Survey of Curtis Crum Lake.” ArcGIS StoryMap, c. 2020. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water/Pages/Water-Maps.aspx
Kentucky Division of Water. “Bathymetric Studies.” Water Maps Portal StoryMap, c. 2020. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water/Pages/Water-Maps.aspx
Thomas, Mary. “EEC’s Innovative Drone Use Promotes Efficiency, Worker Safety.” Land, Air & Water (magazine of the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet), July 8, 2020. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Pages/Land-Air-Water.aspx
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate. Low-Cost Flood Sensors: Innovation for Dam Safety Monitoring. Technical brief, 2020. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/21_0202_st_low_cost_flood_sensors_innovation_for_dam_safety_monitoring.pdf
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate. “Low-Cost Flood Sensors: Innovation for Dam Safety Monitoring.” Project summary, 2025. https://www.dhs.gov/archive/science-and-technology/publication/low-cost-flood-sensors-innovation-dam-safety-monitoring
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Inventory of Dams. “Martin Cnty Water Dist No 1 Dam (KY00106).” Accessed February 19, 2026. https://nid.sec.usace.army.mil
Kentucky Division of Water. “Martin County Water District Workgroup.” Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, 2018–present. https://eec.ky.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water/Protection/Pages/Martin-County-Water-District-Workgroup.aspx
Martin County Water and Sanitation Districts. “Water Quality Report” and “News & Notices” (board agendas, minutes, and capital projects). 2018–present. https://mcub.myruralwater.com
Unrine, Jason M., Wayne T. Sanderson, Nina McCoy, et al. “Spatial and Seasonal Variation in Disinfection Byproducts Concentrations in a Rural Public Drinking Water System: A Case Study of Martin County, Kentucky, USA.” PLOS Water 3, no. 3 (2024): e0000227. https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000227
Fordjour, George, Luke R. Ormsbee, Rebecca C. Shelton, et al. “Modeling the Tradeoff Between Water Loss, Chlorine, and Disinfection Byproducts in a Rural Water System.” Water 17, no. 21 (2025): 3138. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12733702
McSpirit, Stephanie, Sharon Hardesty, and Robert Welch. “The Martin County Project: A Student, Faculty and Citizen Effort at Researching the Effects of a Technological Disaster.” Southern Rural Sociology 18, no. 2 (2002): 162–184. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1312&context=jrss
McSpirit, Stephanie, Shaunna L. Scott, Duane A. Gill, Sharon Hardesty, and Dewayne E. Sims. “Risk Perceptions After a Coal Waste Impoundment Failure: A Case Study of the Martin County Coal Waste Impoundment Failure.” Journal of Rural Social Sciences 22, no. 2 (2007): 1–21. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1312&context=jrss
University of Kentucky, College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. “Pilot Study Finds High Levels of Contaminants in Martin County Drinking Water Samples.” UKNow news release, July 28, 2020. https://medicine.uky.edu/news/pilot-study-finds-high-levels-contaminants-martin-2020-07-29t15-09-48
University of Kentucky and Martin County Concerned Citizens. Preliminary Report on Drinking Water Quality in Martin County, Kentucky. Community-engaged research report, c. 2020. https://www.likenknowledge.org/toolkits/modules/mc-wastewater-systems
Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center and Martin County Concerned Citizens. Drinking Water Affordability Crisis: Martin County, Kentucky. Whitesburg, KY: Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, 2019. https://aclc.org/2019/09/29/just-released-martin-county-drinking-water-affordability-report
Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center. “Martin County Water Crisis.” Case overview, 2018–present. https://aclc.org/environmental-justice/martin-county-water-crisis
Shelton, Rebecca, Ricki Draper, and Mary Cromer. Drinking Water Affordability in Kentucky. Whitesburg, KY: Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center and Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), 2023. https://aclc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Drinking-Water-Affordability-in-Kentucky-9-18-23.pdf
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water. Water Affordability Case Study: Martin County, KY. 2024. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-11/martincounty-affordability.pdf
Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN). “What Happens to Wastewater? Martin County, Kentucky.” Toolkit module, 2023. https://www.likenknowledge.org/toolkits/modules/mc-wastewater-systems
Food & Water Watch. “The Water Crisis in Martin County, Kentucky.” Issue brief, February 2018. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/the-water-crisis-in-martin-county-kentucky
Mountain Citizen. “Curtis Crum Reservoir at Dangerously Low Level.” The Mountain Citizen (Inez, KY), June 7, 2023. https://mountaincitizen.com/2023/06/07/curtis-crum-reservoir-at-dangerously-low-level
Smith, Roger. “Water District Leaks 353 Million Gallons.” The Mountain Citizen (Inez, KY), December 1, 2021. https://mountaincitizen.com/tag/lee-mueller
Mountain Citizen. “Martin County Water Crisis” tag archive (coverage of outages, leaks, and infrastructure projects), 2017–present. https://mountaincitizen.com/tag/martin-county-water-crisis
Rogers, Harold “Hal,” and Matt Bevin. “Rep. Rogers and Gov. Bevin Announce $3.4 Million Project to Assist with Water Supply Issues in Martin County.” Press release, February 24, 2018. https://halrogers.house.gov/2018/2/rep-rogers-and-gov-bevin-announce-3-4-million-project-to-assist-with-water-supply-issues-in-martin-county
Johnson, Stu. “Close to $4 Million Slated for Martin County Water Project.” WEKU, February 26, 2018. https://www.weku.org/mountain-kentucky/2018-02-26/close-to-4-million-slated-for-martin-county-water-project
“Officials Announce New Plan to Fix Martin Co.’s Water Woes.” WKYT, February 24, 2018. https://www.wkyt.com/content/news/Officials-announce-new-plan-to-fix-Martin-Cos-water-woes-475049553.html
McClanahan, Gil. “Martin County, Ky. to Receive $1.5 Million Federal Earmark for Water Issues.” WCHS-TV, May 5, 2022. https://wchstv.com/news/local/martin-county-ky-getting-15-million-federal-earmark-for-water-issues
Plona, Kristofer. “Beshear Awards More Than $400k to Water Infrastructure Improvements in Martin County.” WCHS-TV, March 18, 2022. https://wchstv.com/news/local/beshear-awards-more-than-400k-to-water-infrastructure-improvements-in-martin-county
McClanahan, Gil. “Water Leaks and Outages Still Plague Martin County, Kentucky.” WCHS-TV, January 2, 2023. https://wchstv.com/news/local/water-leaks-and-outages-still-plague-martin-county-kentucky
Gilpin, Lyndsey. “Kentucky’s Rural Water Disaster Could Get Worse Before It Gets Better.” Scalawag Magazine, March 20, 2018. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2018/03/kentuckys-rural-water-disaster-could-get-worse-before-it-gets-better
Sellers, Frances Stead. “A Crisis in Kentucky Shows the High Cost of Clean Drinking Water.” Washington Post, April 16, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/a-crisis-in-kentucky-shows-the-high-cost-of-clean-drinking-water/2019/04/16/fd959692-56e8-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html
Jarvie, Jenny. “The Water Runs Milky and Can Feel Like Fire. In This Impoverished County, Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan May Not Help.” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2018. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-kentucky-water-20180212-story.html
Kounang, Nadia. “The Kentucky County Where the Water Smells Like Diesel.” CNN, March 30, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/30/health/kentucky-water-crisis/index.html
National Public Radio. “Martin County, Kentucky’s Water Crisis Isn’t Over. But It Has Changed.” All Things Considered, August 22, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/905001693/martin-county-kentuckys-water-crisis-isnt-over-but-it-has-changed
“Martin County Water Crisis.” Wikipedia, last modified December 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis
Kentucky Geological Survey. Water-Resource Development Plan, Big Sandy Area Development District. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1999. https://kgs.uky.edu
TrailsRUs. “Fishing and Boating Opportunities in Martin County.” Tourism and recreation guide, c. 2000s. http://www.trailsrus.com
Author Note: As a historian writing from within the eastern Kentucky coalfields, I am drawn to the places where infrastructure and everyday life meet. I hope this story of Curtis Crum Reservoir helps you see Martin County’s water crisis as a local struggle that also speaks to rural communities across Appalachia.