GLASGOW — Some things are just hard to fathom. Hard to explain. Hard to ignore. A flaming drinking water well is one of them.

But Calvin and Denise Howard’s water well has been burning since May. I know because I stood next to it, watching the flame shoot a couple of feet into the air while talking to Denise Howard. State inspectors have determined the well is “mine impacted,” contaminated with methane. It’s a jarring sight anywhere, but this well is in a remote corner of Pike County, along the Big Branch of Brushy Creek. Driving through the forested area along narrow curving, broken roads, it’s hard to imagine a part of Kentucky which looks safer from industrial pollution. But the Howards have been told that if they don’t keep the well lit, it might blow.

The Howards and neighbors along the holler have heard rumblings from beneath the ground. Said, Eda Stacy, 70, who lives about a half mile up the road from the Howards: “There are these big thumps under my trailer. It’d go like thunder when there weren’t no thunder.” It’s unnatural, surreal. Stacy doesn’t drink her water; she avoids contact with it.

Denise Howard’s brother-in-law, Mickey Bevins, showed me a two-month-old washing machine. The drum was a reddish-rusty color, stained by his well water, and once white bath towels washed in the water have turned the same color. He said his daughter’s hair is falling out and his teenaged son has been vomiting. Bevins is a coal miner and he spoke proudly of his profession even as state inspectors took samples of his well. He’s heard the rumblings under ground – “It sounds like a big bass drum.” He said it stopped “for a while after (the Howards’) well blew up, but lately it’s been doing it again.”

There are 13 families along the road who don’t dare drink their water – water which Stacy said used to be just fine. The test results from Bevins’ well aren’t available yet, but tests on other area wells which have shown traces of such heavy metals as lead, chromium and even arsenic have been completed. And though these wells are in the same general area as the Howards’ burning well, the state has determined none of the other wells is mine impacted.

These people aren’t anti-coal. Bevins makes his living on coal. Denise Howard said she supports the coal miners but isn’t fond of coal companies – “just like I support the troops but not the politicians who make all the decisions.” They lived next to coal operations without complaint until their water went bad. No one I visited that day said they wanted to see the coal industry put out of business. They just want their clean water and their former lives back. They want the law enforced and they want some help from the state when their families’ health has been endangered.

They don’t understand how wells which produced good, clean water for years suddenly are toxic. They don’t understand why state inspectors conclude suddenly contaminated wells, wells which lie near a burning well full of methane, aren’t “mine impacted.”

I’m no scientist. I don’t have any geological expertise or knowledge. But when I saw that flaming well, I didn’t need to know much science. I just knew what I was looking at was unnatural. Land looking into the worried faces of Denise Howard and Eda Stacy, I knew that someone ought to do something.

Ronnie Ellis writes for CNHI News Service and is based in Frankfort, Ky. He may be contacted by email at rellis@cnhi.com. Follow CNHI News Service stories on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cnhifrankfort.