Calling Hillary

Another photo op.

“I’m scared to take a bath,” said Ethel Strum, who lives in St. Joseph, a community of barely 1,000 people in northeast Louisiana.

She turned on the tap in the bathroom sink of her tidy one-story home and the water flowed clear for a second before fading to a milky brown. In her kitchen, a few cases of bottled water, which she uses for everything from brushing her teeth to cooking, are stacked on the table.

“I drive to Newellton to shower.

[...]

Among the many problems are frequent outages, water thick with iron sediment from the aging pipes, and poorly communicated boil-water advisories. “Water should be free until it’s fixed,” she said.

  alJazeer

Well, actually, in a rich democracy, water should be free.

While state officials and the EPA have deemed the water safe to drink, virtually no one risks it. Most here do not even use tap water to cook or brush teeth, and many, especially children, bathe with bottled water. Lots of residents spend several hundred a month on store-bought water.

To add to the mounting frustration, $6 million of state funds allocated to St. Joseph for water line repairs in 2013 are still being withheld because the town’s mayor, Edward Brown, has failed several times to turn in a mandatory financial audit on time. [...He] said he expects to file the overdue audit by the end of February.

[...]

[St. Joseph resident Garrett] Boyte, along with colleagues in the Servant Leadership Corps of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, have sought to attract public attention on the issue through a recent social media push and an online petition to the Obama administration for federal assistance to St. Joseph. The effort has just over one-tenth of the 100,000 signatures it needs by Feb. 19 to reach its goal.

[...]

[T]he town’s water woes illustrate a more slow-moving and commonplace catastrophe: failing infrastructure in small, impoverished communities that cannot afford to replace their systems, leaving residents with limited resources to cope on their own.

And, really, it will totally look like the campaign schmoozing in Flint that it is if she doesn't cover a similar water problem in Louisiana.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.