West Virginia has put $3.2 million on the table to test well water and hand out filters in McDowell and Mingo counties, and the state is not planning to do the door knocking itself. The Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Health announced this week that they are taking applications from organizations that can deliver the program, and the eligibility list reads like a watershed group roster: nonprofits, local health departments, and colleges.
WVDEP and the WV Department of Health opened applications on November 10 for partners to run the $3.2 million Water Is Medicine program in McDowell and Mingo counties, which will test water at a minimum of 1,000 higher-priority homes and put filters into at least 5,000 households in all. Application materials and the deadline are posted on wvOASIS.gov, and questions go to RHTP@wv.gov.
Two tiers, five thousand households
The program splits into two funding tiers. The first puts up to $1.2 million in federal Rural Health Transformation Program money toward testing water at a minimum of 1,000 higher-priority homes, with filters provided based on what the tests find. The second adds up to $2 million in state funds for filters and training for at least 4,000 additional households. Together that is at least 5,000 homes in two counties where many families rely on private wells, springs, or cisterns that no utility monitors and no regulation covers.
Priority goes to households with unsafe water or no running water at all, and to homes with young children or older adults. Anyone who has spent time in the southern coalfields knows those categories overlap more often than they should.
Who the state is looking for
Public and private organizations can apply, including nonprofits, local health departments, and colleges. Applicants must be registered to do business in West Virginia and must be able to serve both counties, either directly or through partners. The scoring preferences are the interesting part: organizations with existing local relationships, quick access to priority homes, and plans for lasting water safety move to the front of the line.
That is language written for groups that already have volunteers on the ground, not for contractors who would be meeting the community for the first time. A watershed association with years of monitoring data and a church basement full of neighbors is exactly the kind of applicant the criteria describe.
The minimum number of households the Water Is Medicine program commits to reaching with testing or filters across McDowell and Mingo counties.
“We need partners who can build trust with families.”
Dr. Arvin Singh, Secretary, West Virginia Department of Health
A template the rest of the basin should watch
McDowell and Mingo sit south of our basin, but the program design travels well. Pairing a state environmental agency with a health department, funding community organizations to do the delivery, and ranking applicants on trust rather than overhead rates is a model that would fit household well testing anywhere in the Upper Ohio, where plenty of hollows in Fayette, Greene, and Preston counties face the same private-well blind spot. If this round works, it becomes the example to point to when the next legislature asks whether such a program is practical.
Groups interested in applying, or in partnering with an applicant that needs local reach, should pull the application materials from wvOASIS.gov sooner rather than later. The announcement did not print a deadline, which means the date is sitting in the application packet, and nobody wants to discover it the week it closes.
Reporting from My Buckhannon, November 10, 2026, and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection announcement of November 9, 2026. Current as of November 13, 2026.
