Cathy Mabe of Spring Hill, W.Va., makes use of a couple of watering cans to carry water at a bring-your-own-containers water filling station in South Charleston. Lisa Hechesky/Reuters

West Virginia American Water customers line up for water after waiting hours for a water truck, only to have it emptied in about 20 minutes. Tom Hindman/Getty Images

Residents in Charleston, W.Va., at a distribution center to load up on bottled water. Michael Switzer/AP

People wait in line for water from a 7,500-gallon tanker truck brought in from Washington, Pa. Craig Cunningham/The Daily Mail/AP

Wireman has covered her kitchen faucet with a bag because she kept forgetting about the ban on using tap water for drinking and washing. She is one of thousands of area residents affected by the water ban following the chemical spill Thursday. Michael Switzer/AP

Bonnie Wireman of Dry Branch, W.Va., sits in her home with water she has collected. The ban on drinking and washing with tap water has had a substantial impact on her family, she said. Michael Switzer/AP

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The disastrous impact of mining on West Virginia’s water resources goes back generations and could soon render much of the state’s water undrinkable, activists and experts say.

Officials on Monday started lifting the ban on tap water prompted by last week's chemical spill in the Elk River. About 300,000 people in nine counties have been unable to use their water other than to flush toilets for the past five days.

Experts, however, say the problem goes much deeper, and that coal mining made many wells and streams useless years ago.

“For more than a century, the coal industry has had pretty much free rein to do whatever it wants,” said Vivian Stockman, spokeswoman for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Stockman points to a common coal-industry practice: pumping chemical-laden wastewater directly into the ground, where it can leech into the water table and turn what had been drinkable well water into a poisonous cocktail of chemicals.

“All this waste is going underground for years, and then one day people start noticing their well water turning sometimes orange, sometimes black. The water stinks,” Stockman told Al Jazeera.

As a result, people in some parts of West Virginia who had been able to rely on water from the ground found themselves having to go onto a municipal system. But now, for those around Charleston under a water ban, even their public tap isn't an option.

Bill Price of the West Virginia chapter of the the Sierra Club, an environmentalist group, said that’s exactly what happened to the town of Prenter in Boone County, which he said fought for years to get water from a city supplier. That supplier is West Virginia American Water, the company that has imposed the restrictions.

“After losing their local water due to pollution, they were able to get a source of clean water by installing a public system with a source that is around 50 miles away, only to have that source now impacted by a spill of a chemical used in processing of coal,” he said.

Price said that’s the case for most people in the nine counties under the water restrictions. First wells went sour, and now their municipal water has too.

Stockman said that the runoff from mountaintop-removal mining and the effect of underground slurry can cause severe health problems for people living near mines.

“People start getting ill, in household after household. Rare cancers, little kids with kidney stones, premature deaths,” she said.

She referred to a long legal battle in Mingo County over coal-waste disposal, when West Virginians won a settlement against coal company Massey Energy over health problems and drinking-water contamination after the company pumped coal waste into abandoned mines.

Price pointed to a statistical relationship between health problems and areas with mountaintop-removal mining, in which a mining company blasts off the top of a mountain to get to the coal inside. The rubble goes into a nearby valley.

“Higher rates of birth defects and shorter life expectancy have been shown in mountaintop-removal areas compared to other parts of West Virginia,” he said.