The water isn’t always brown, but Scarlet Weathers lives like it is. Not once has she drank the tap water from her kitchen sink in her house in Sweeny, Texas. She knows, like everyone else in the town, that it can’t be trusted. Even her small grandchildren have noticed it during bathtime. Why is the water brown?
She and her daughter, Tally, instead spend hundreds of dollars a year on bottled water and refillable jugs. It’s common practice in Sweeny, a small town about 60 miles southwest of Houston. Weathers, who grew up in the area, has never known anything else: cooking with bottled water, feeding animals with bottled water, brushing teeth with bottled water, stained dishes, stained sinks, stained clothes.
