One winter morning C.H. Underwood looked up and down the street in his small town of O’Brien, Texas and realized something was wrong. The trash hadn’t been picked up that week, or the week before, “and there was Christmas wrappings flying all over town.” Underwood, coach of the high school debate and football teams, and part time rancher, made a series of phone calls to the members of the city council. He discovered that the trash collection company hadn’t been paid in weeks, and so had stopped coming. Further investigation revealed a deeper breakdown. The city had been unable to pay its bills to the utility company that provided treated reservoir water for the drinking supply, and as a result was cut off from the service. Rather than disclose its dire financial straits, the city council had decided to switch to supplying residents solely with water pumped from the ground – water that contained illegally high concentrations of nitrates, a pollutant common in agricultural areas. Residents of O’Brien drank this contaminated water for months before Underwood made his discoveries. The school eventually switched to using bottled water. Many residents purchased individual water filtration systems for their homes.