Citizens Fear They Were Exposed to Contaminated Drinking Water for Months

SUGAR GROVE, Va. – Michael Ward stood up at a community meeting to declare he had diarrhea eight times last year – a peculiar public announcement, but one met with gratitude by dozens of his neighbors, who had squeezed into a muggy gymnasium for the June gathering.

Ward was expressing their commonly held fear – that their drinking water had been making them sick for months.

The Rye Valley Water Authority on June 11 sent a letter to some 550 households notifying customers of the presence of a bacteria called coliform in their water. Found naturally in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, coliform is used as a standard measure of fecal-matter pollutants in drinking water. Its presence in the Rye Valley system indicates that surface water might have infiltrated the water source, which is an underground spring, and quite possibly brought along other parasites such as giardia lamblia and cryptosporidium. Those parasites can cause diarrhea, headaches, even death in the most severe cases.

The water system’s notice said residents must boil all of the water they consume, even to brush their teeth – for the next 18 months. And the notice began with this sentence: “In July 2008 Rye Valley Water Authority began noticing changes in our untreated or raw water testing results.”

The 11 month lag before water customers were told raised many concerns.

But Robert Parker, Southwest Virginia spokesman for the Virginia Department of Health, said there are no interim measures requiring the health department to notify the public of a potential danger before it officially confirms that the water supply was compromised.

Testing the water

The water authority collected its first bad sample on June 2, 2008, according to a report from the monitoring body, the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Drinking Water in Abingdon. Because of that sample, the health department required weekly testing. 

The health department uses a review sheet, a sort of flow chart, to determine whether the bad samples resulted from surface water infiltrating the underground water source. Water experts call that situation “groundwater under the direct influence of surface water,” or GUDI.

If that is determined to be the case, the water authority must issue a boil notice and install a proper filtration system within 18 months.

The flow chart’s first step asks if there’s been a disease outbreak, chemical spill or a known leak, such as a sinkhole.

None of those options applied in the Rye Valley system, so they moved on to Step 2, which requires a minimum of 20 weekly tests.

Then, Step 2b asks if 10 percent of those required samples have a coliform count of more than 100 colonies per 100 milliliters.

“If the answer to Step 2b is YES – STOP – the source is GUDI,” the flow-chart memo states. 

Rye Valley collected its 20th sample on Oct. 7, 2008. Three of those 20 samples, or 15 percent, contained more than 100 colonies.

But the testing didn’t stop.

“Issuing a boil water notice is difficult on people and it’s not something you do without sound justification,” said Richard Puckett, a field director for the drinking water office who is responsible for monitoring Rye Valley’s system.

Puckett also said the health department decided to do more testing because the system had no history of bacterial problems, and there had been no reported illnesses.

But residents said diarrhea is not something one typically calls the health department to report, and they had chalked bouts of intestinal troubles up to bad luck or bad diet.

Definitive evidence

The health department flow-chart memo sets those first 20 samples as a minimum, allowing local field directors to choose the number, frequency and duration of testing. Puckett said his office decided to use six-month increments for Rye Valley.

And at the end of that first six months, on Nov. 24, bad samples for Rye Valley’s water were at exactly 10 percent with almost half collected in October, which is traditionally the driest month of the year in the region.

Puckett said the numbers dropped during the fall because bacteria levels are high in rainy months and low in drier ones. So they went on to do a second six-month testing period.

In January, the bacteria numbers shot back up, to 396 colonies per 100 milliliters, right on cue with an increase in precipitation, according to records of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Over the next four months, there were three additional high tests, finally reaching 770 colonies total coliform on May 7.

That’s when the drinking water office determined that the boil water notice should be issued.

Before that, as testing was ongoing, Puckett said, the water authority and the health department tried to exhaust every other possible cause, including repairing old spring boxes.

“All of those questions that arose during the meeting made me a little suspicious,” said state Delegate Bill Carrico, R-Independence, who hosted the meeting
in June, when Ward revealed his problems with diarrhea.

“It raised some red flags when I started hearing from the people, especially those saying they’d been sick,” Carrico said. “I don’t understand if this has been a problem for some time or if it just started. I’ve always been very proactive to be open with the public. ... I don’t know what happened in this situation and who dropped the ball.”

Adding filtration

Now, the Rye Valley Water Authority has 18 months to install a million-dollar filtration system, and its managers don’t know how they’re going to pay for it.

Carrico said he has been working on long- and short-term fixes, such as asking county officials to make an emergency declaration for discretionary funds to buy water for the community.

He also is waiting for the water authority, specifically the system operator, to determine what grants and loans might be available.

“I told them to give me some indication of how they want to move forward after they come up with some idea,” Carrico said. “I told them I would write letters, make calls. I haven’t heard from them.”

Meanwhile, a month after the notice and two weeks after the meeting, residents have seen no relief.

“This makes you think about everything you’ve never had to think about,” said Ward, a father of two small children. “My wife is from Belarus, and you cannot drink that water. We know what this can do and you wouldn’t think it could happen in the U.S.”

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