West Virginians line up to get free water during a tap water ban earlier this month. Residents are still worried about the public water supply. Craig Cunningham/The Daily Mail/AP

I don’t feel snubbed, but maybe it’s because I’m Appalachian. I’m used to it. Maria Gunnoe Environmental activist

To some West Virginians, Obama’s failure to mention their continuing plight is a letdown but doesn’t come as a shock for people who say they’re accustomed to seeing their part of the country ignored. “As a native West Virginian and Appalachian scholar, I am disappointed but unsurprised that President Obama did not mention the West Virginia water crisis in his State of the Union,” said Krista Bryson, from Winfield, W.Va. Bryson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Ohio State University, studying the culture of the region where she grew up. Winfield is northwest of Charleston in Putnam County, one of nine affected by the crisis. “Unfortunately, the federal government’s dismissal or willful ignorance of serious problems in West Virginia and Appalachia has been the norm for decades. Appalachian problems are not prioritized in the scope of national politics,” said Bryson, who started a blog to keep track of the water crisis. She also blames what she calls more than 100 years of discrimination against people from the impoverished mountain region, long a source of raw resources including coal and timber. “And because this discrimination has gone completely unchecked in the public sphere, it persists,” said Bryson, “blinding people to the many problems Appalachians face every day, problems that are not of our own choosing but part of an inescapable system of inequality that the rest of the nation is blithely inattentive to.” Dustin White, an environmental activist, echoed Bryson’s view, saying he was disappointed in Obama's failure to mention the issue. “It seems the plight of West Virginians and others throughout the Appalachian region is still not even a blip on his radar,” White said. But Obama did talk at length about issues that affect West Virginians, in particular natural gas and alternative energy; he just didn’t call out the state by name. Most of West Virginia lies inside the Marcellus Shale, a massive area of gas deposits targeted for hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking — which critics say is often responsible for water contamination. White worries that the location of the deposit will deepen his state’s economic dependence on fossil fuels and threaten water resources. The fracking process not only uses local sources of fresh water — it pumps chemical-laced fracking fluid water into the ground, much as coal mining involves storing huge reservoirs of coal and chemical “slurry” underground or in aboveground impoundments. Environmentalists blame that practice for contaminating water in wells and streams. Obama, in his speech, hailed $100 billion in natural gas investment as a bridge between carbon and solar energy, saying, “If extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change ...

A fracking rig in Pennsylvania. Like West Virginia, Pennsylvania is part of the Marcellus Shale. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty “I’ll cut red tape to help states get those factories built, and this Congress can help by putting people to work building fueling stations that shift more cars and trucks from foreign oil to American natural gas ... “Taken together, our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet.” Vivian Stockman, spokeswoman for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, praised some parts of Obama’s speech but sharply criticized his views on fracking. “I’m glad the president mentioned solar energy and emphatically stated that climate change is already causing dire problems and we must answer to our children for our actions now,” Stockman told Al Jazeera. “I agree we should cut subsidies to fossil fuel industries, but it’s wrong to claim natural gas (fracking) is a bridge fuel. Fracking, like mountaintop-removal coal mining, is poisoning our water.” Mountaintop-removal mining is widespread in Appalachia. It involves blasting off the top of a mountain to get to the coal inside, and environmentalists blame it not only for destroying the landscape but also for introducing chemicals into local wells and streams. “Every action the president wants to take depends on clean water, for without that we cannot live,” said Stockman. “Americans have come to take easily accessible, potable water for granted. “What’s happened here, with the chemical-laced, licorice-smelling water, is a wake-up call. I wish the president had said, ‘We all need to wake up and smell the water.’” To White, Obama’s climate-change-conscious energy policy aimed at increasing all sources of power to combat carbon emissions, from natural gas to solar power, rings hollow. “Natural gas, like coal, is a finite resource that will create nothing but a boom-and-bust economy for areas, and neither can be extracted without impacting human health,” White said, referring to the "resource curse" of coal that some scholars say likely keeps Appalachia poor. Maria Gunnoe, also with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said Obama’s support for fracking sounded to her like an “eviction notice,” but the lack of mention of the state’s water woes was worst. “I just feel like he’s so disassociated from what’s happening in West Virginia,” said Gunnoe, who is from Bob White, a small town in Boone County that was under a water-use ban. “He said nothing about 300,000 people without good water." A letter to the editor published Sunday in The New York Times called for the president to invite Gunnoe to the State of the Union because of her record of environmental activism and the fact that her hometown was in the path of the water ban. She didn’t get the invitation. “I don’t feel snubbed, but maybe it’s because I’m Appalachian. I’m used to it.”

‘Great speech’

Not everyone who lives in West Virginia expected Obama to bring up the issue, however, nor did they all fault him for it. One of those people was Karen Kunz, a professor of public administration at West Virginia University in Morgantown, a city that was not directly affected by the water ban. Kunz studies the effect of corporations on public finances. She said that many elected leaders in West Virginia are “blatantly beholden to the fossil fuels industry,” with a few exceptions, adding that the cozy relationship has done harm to residents’ water resources. To Kunz, "natural gas is picking up where the coal companies left off, in terms of potential pollution, but without all the local jobs created by coal." Despite her misgivings about fossil fuels, Obama's not mentioning the water crisis did not disappoint her. “I thought it was a great speech. The president was relaxed and witty,” said Kunz, who said she appreciated how Obama touched on a variety of issues like “raising the minimum wage, vowing to promote immigration reform, bring our troops home and close Guantanamo.” “He never mentioned the water disaster in Charleston — or Hurricane Sandy, for that matter. They were not appropriate topics for this speech; the State of the Union traditionally is broader — national — in scope.”

‘Plenty to vent’