Woman Pours Water on Tuscaloosa Leader in Wednesday "Spectacle"

A hearing in Montgomery turned strange Wednesday morning when a barefoot activist poured a small bottle of water on the head of Kyle South, a former state Representative and the current president of the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama.

Video uploaded to the platform formerly known as Twitter by environmental journalist Lee Hedgepeth shows the woman, reportedly Anne DiPrizio, standing behind a seated South and dumping water in his hair in a self-proclaimed "spectacle."

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South told the Thread he was in Montgomery Wednesday morning more because of his long tenure in the Alabama legislature and not in his capacity with the Tuscaloosa Chamber.

South said during his time in office, there was a longstanding problem with the "above-ground remediation of biosolids in West Jefferson County," that disrupted the lives of many Alabama residents for years.

Readers may remember statewide and national coverage of the issue - the infamous "poop trains" dumping biosolid waste from other states on a plot of land in Jefferson County.

He said it was this experience that brought him to a hearing at a hotel in Montgomery Wednesday to discuss how Alabama Power stores and gets rid of coal ash. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed that the utility provider should not be allowed to keep the ash in ponds that some fear are seeping toxic waste into nearby waterways. South was there to argue against the proposal.

"They've got a remediation process that's legal, approved and everything else that the [Alabama Department of Environmental Management] allows within the [Environmental Protection Agency's] rules," South said. "It's almost like they're trying to change the rules of the game mid-stream and there's been a lot of back-and-forth about it."

That message was not well-received by DiPrizio, who poured the beverage on South as she decried the drinking water quality in Alabama.

"Everybody knows that this is a spectacle," she said during the act. "You've created a spectacle. Y'all might say, 'Oh well that's crazy, that's a crazy unhinged lady!' Yeah, I might be at this point! because we've tried every reasonable..."

DiPrizio then stopped mid-sentence to note that South was "just sitting there" as she dumped the water on him.

South told the Thread he was not exactly surprised it happened and had determined not to react explosively.

"You look around those settings and everything's pretty emotional to start with, then you get some people that are maybe a little too passionate about a topic and get them all bottled up in there together - these things tend to happen," South said. "She kind of caught me off-guard but I was definitely not gonna give her the reaction that she was seeking."

It also seems DiPrizio is no stranger to this kind of self-proclaimed spectacle - other reporting shows she has been arrested before in 2019 for spreading paint on the glass wall of the Alabama State House during a debate on abortion law. In 2015, she was arrested for not leaving the Autuaga County Courthouse the day after Probate Judge Al Booth stopped issuing marriage licenses there so his office would not have to comply with a Supreme Court ruling affirming the right to same-sex unions.