Edmonson County Water District addresses concerns with water quality

EDMONSON COUNTY, Ky.- Residents in Edmonson County are noticing what some say is an alarming difference in their drinking water.

One local resident, Jenny Turley, shares her first reaction to seeing what the water did to her wash cloth.

Jenny says, “Shock! I was shocked. I was surprised. I always knew it smelled like chlorine, but to go so far as to bleach the rag all the way through, just from 6 hours of dripping on it, I was shocked and I was appalled.”

A few years ago, Jenny added a filtration system to her house, because she’s also concerned that the water is having negative effects on people’s health. 

She says, “A lady, this my neighbor up the road, she posted on this post and said she’d had migraines three and four days a week. And she got one of the letters from the water district and she stopped drinking the tap water. She has two and three migraines every three months now. It was an immediate change.”

Edmonson County Water District officials tell us that they are treating the water right now, and the levels of chlorine being added are normal.

“It’s… always been my position when I’m working with the water company, you know, to serve the people and try to put out good, clean drinking water. You know, that’s our job. We have to put chlorine in the water to disinfect, and if we didn’t have chlorine, it wouldn’t be safe to drink.”

Western Kentucky University environmental geoscience professor and director at the Center for Human GeoEnvironmental Studies, Dr. Jason Polk, agrees that the treatment levels are not dangerous, even if the water may look a little different.

Based on his experience running test for hundreds of water distributors, he says, “A lot of times these utilities will check it not just at the plant where the water is treated, but also throughout the system in different areas to ensure that the chlorine levels are staying high enough to kill anything that would be potentially harmful to anyone’s health, but then also make sure that it maintains that so that the water safe, no matter where it’s being used.”

Although this is defined as safe, many people are still concerned about the chemicals in the water and think it should be disinfected a different way. 

In the meantime, several families have installed water filters on their faucets to limit the number of chemicals.

If you prefer this option, a few in-home systems are Berkey water filtering systems and Aquasauna Culligan water filter systems as well. There is also a store, the Nutrition Center at 715 U.S. 31-W Bypass, that has a seven-stage water filtration system. You must bring your own bottles, at 8 cents a gallon.