As water system sees improvements, residents of Eastern Kentucky county still don’t trust it
A few months ago, a co-worker who had come from out of town made coffee at the office in Inez where Mikeala Marcum works.
Marcum asked if she had used tap water to make the coffee. When the woman said she had, Marcum had her pour it out.
“You cannot drink Martin County water,” Marcum said.
The manager of the Martin County water system argues that is not correct — that the system meets all water-quality standards and the water is safe to drink.
But after many years of shortfalls in water quality in the system under prior operators, insufficient investment to keep the system running well and poor management that left the district on the verge of collapse, many residents don’t drink the water, buying bottled water instead.
Some even buy jugs of water for their pets.
There have been improvements in recent years under outside, professional management that the Kentucky Public Service Commission ordered.
But the district still experiences frequent line breaks that shut down service to residents. It loses more than half the water it treats because of leaks, water theft and faulty meters, and is past schedule to upgrade its raw-water intake.
On top of that, it hasn’t been able to overcome a pervasive belief among residents that they can’t trust the water.
‘Customers complain’
That belief is rooted in longstanding problems.
From July 2013 to July 2017, for instance, the water system failed to comply with limits on the disinfection by-products (DBPs) in the treated water it sent to customers, according to a January 2018 report from BlueWater Kentucky, a consultant.
From December 2018 to December 2019, researchers from the University of Kentucky and a group called Martin County Concerned Citizens took part in testing tap water at 97 homes around the rural, mountainous county.
The results showed that 47% of samples had at least one contaminant that exceeded safe drinking water guidelines, most commonly DBPs, which Jason Unrine, a UK professor who took part in the study, said are associated with problems including bladder cancer and developmental birth defects.
The tests also found coliform bacteria in 13% of samples, which could indicate the presence of harmful bacteria. The tests did not find E. coli, which is linked to fecal coliform, however.
More than 70% of the people who responded to a survey reported low water pressure at times, while 66% reported a bad odor, 51% said the water was sometimes discolored, and 24% said it irritated their skin.
Only 12% said they drank it.
The system had frequent water outages, and even when the water was on, customers complained it sometimes flowed out of the tap brown because of sediment.
In 2019, state regulators said the system was deep in debt and near collapse. For years, management had made little effort to repair or replace aging infrastructure such as pipes and meters and hadn’t kept adequate financial records, the PSC said.
“Customers complain that the water, when it is available, smells and is sometimes dirty. Customers rely on bottled water for drinking, washing dishes, and bathing,” the PSC said in an order. “Martin District managers and commissioners historically refused to seek sources of revenue, including reasonable rate increases, to fund the periodic replacement of aged infrastructure.”
In another order in 2020, the PSC said that over a 20-year period, the district “failed to resolve financial and operational mismanagement despite multiple investigations” and plans for improvement, which the district never implemented.
The agency made the district hire an outside management company, Missouri-based Alliance Water Resources.
‘Nothing wrong’
There have been improvements since Alliance began management in 2020.
The company has worked to better map the system, improved leak detection and made a number of line replacements, for instance, said Craig Miller, the on-site manager for Alliance.
Repairs and other work by the system are done correctly under Alliance management, “instead of just cobbling things together” as in earlier times, said Nina McCoy, a member of the water board and head of Martin County Concerned Citizens, which has pushed for improvements for years.
The system also has reduced the amount of water it loses.
Water loss in the system averaged 72% in 2022 but was down to 67% for 2023, Miller said, cutting the amount of water the system paid to treat but lost by tens of millions of gallons annually.
The system maintains good water quality, Miller said.
The latest report available from the district shows that in 2022, the level of one disinfectant by-product called triholamethanes was detected at ranges above the maximum level allowed at some sites, but the average overall was within the acceptable range and the system met all water quality standards.
“There’s nothing wrong with the water in Martin County,” Miller said.
Intake problems
Even with the improvements, however, the system still faces challenges.
Miller said the system, which has 230 miles of lines serving about 3,500 customers, was badly designed and built. In some cases contractors laid lines without proper support under them, increasing the potential for leaks.
Workers have fixed more than 800 leaks since the end of 2022, more than Miller had seen in more than a decade of working in other systems, he said.
The leaks and need for repairs cause interruptions in service to some customers.
The district has been approved for $11.2 million from various sources, including abandoned mine land funding and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for a variety of projects, though not all the money has been disbursed.
Several projects are in the works, but in some cases, the district has had to scale back the scope of the original plans after bids came in higher than the amount of money available.
For instance, a project to replace water lines to hundreds of homes in the Warfield area was scaled back to a fraction of that, McCoy said.
One reason is that costs for materials and labor have gone up since projects were OK’d.
The district also hasn’t been able to complete a project to improve its raw water intake, which Miller describes as the worst intake in the nation.
The system uses a pump on the riverbank to pull raw water from the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, piping it over a mountain to a reservoir near the water treatment plant.
The new intake should have been up and running at least 18 months ago, Miller said, but the project has hit various delays.
McCoy said the district got two pumps, but one got flooded and workers dropped the other one while unloading it, damaging it and causing a delay.
‘We do need help’
In late February, the water district was waiting on a part needed for the system to raise the intake pump during times when the Tug Fork floods to keep it from being damaged.
Until that project is done, the water district is renting a diesel pump to use at the intake, at a cost of more than $50,000 a month for the pump and fuel, Miller said.
It will likely take until the end of April to finish the project, Miller said.
Even with the improvement in water loss from 2022 to 2023, the amount of water the district treats and loses before it gets to homes and businesses is staggering.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in one report that the average loss in water systems around the country was 16%, and the Kentucky Public Service Commission said in a November 2019 report that unaccounted-for water loss over 15% on an on-going basis was “cause for concern.”
Some of its distribution lines in the system are more than 60 years old, Miller said.
He has estimated it would take $60 million to replace lines and fix all the other problems the district has now.
That doesn’t include the cost to replace the “dilapidated” treatment plant, he said.
Much of that will have to come from federal or state sources. After two rate increases since 2018 that raised the minimum water bills a total of 84%, residents say they can’t afford higher rates.
“We do need help with funding,” Miller said.
‘Way more work’
Whatever improvements the water system has seen in recent years haven’t erased the distrust many residents have in their tap water.
After many years in which people felt like they were lied to or not given adequate information about water quality, financial conditions and other issues in the system, it will take complete openness to restore trust, McCoy said.
“The main thing that we need here is total transparency,” she said.
Some residents are concerned that even if the water is good quality when it leaves the treatment plant, it could pick up contaminants along the way to their homes.
Some also said they feel the water is heavy on chlorine.
“Some mornings it smells like you dipped yourself into a pool the chlorine is so high,” Anna Wolf said one recent day as she waited on customers at a tobacco store in Warfield.
Wolf said she buys bottled water for drinking and cooking and to give to her dogs.
“I don’t trust it,” she said.
As he walked out of a grocery store with two gallons of bottled drinking water recently, Steve Kilburn said uses water from the Martin County system in his window-washing business, but doesn’t drink it.
“Sometimes I refer to the water as caustic,” he said.
Marcum, 28, said her parents and grandparents told her growing up not to drink the water. These days she sends bottled water to school for her 8-year-old son, Miles, to drink and gives bottled water to their dog and guinea pigs.
“It’s sad,” she said. “Everyone’s told not to drink it.”
Another resident, Boonie Fletcher, said he spends about $50 a month for bottled water, on top of his $80 bill for water and sewer service.
“It makes a lot of people mad because they have to pay a high-dollar water bill and buy water at the store,” Fletcher said.
Miller said it has become ingrained in the culture of the county to criticize the water system, but people should know the water system is headed in the right direction.
“This is not gonna happen quickly . . . and we’re gonna hit snags,” he said. “We have a bunch of challenges.”
At a recent community meeting about the water system held by LiKEN Knowledge — which works for environmental and social justice — community engagement coordinator Madison Mooney asked participants to list their concerns about the water.
The responses included “What it is doing to our skin;” “Running out of bottled water and can’t drink the water at our home;” What health problems is it causing over time;” and kids accidentally getting it in their mouth while bathing “which should be fine but isn’t.”
Mooney, who works to help residents understand what is going on with the water system, said she has seen improvement.
But, she said. “There’s still way, way more work that needs to be done with our system.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2024 at 10:00 AM.
