Serving as President of the Sandy Hook Water Association was largely a symbolic job for Gerald Wingert for most of the 41 years he filled the role.
Wingert, now retired but still active in his small rural Pennsylvania community, would lead meetings and handle some administrative duties for the association, but the beauty of the group was the same as the water system they relied on for decades: it more or less ran itself.
That was the case, at least, until the Pennsylvania state government got involved.
After 17 years of back-and-forth with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Sandy Hook Water Association’s “public” water system went offline this year. Mounting costs due to DEP regulations and legal headaches led the members to vote to disband, with many forced to instead dig wells or build cisterns to have access to clean water.
The three-letter agency succeeded in snuffing out a lifetime of work for Wingert and the dozens of others who helped provide a small community with clean, natural drinking water for more than half a century.
The Sandy Hook Water Association was established in 1965 by residents in rural southern Pennsylvania, ten or so miles outside the small borough of Chambersburg. The inhabitants discovered a natural spring in the mountainous terrain perched above their community and took it upon themselves to construct a system of pipes and plumbing to carry the spring water down the mountain to their homes below.
Environmentalist will never be satisfied !!!!