Her mother, who runs a cake-baking business next door, steers clear, too. Crystal Marley mixes bottled water in her Scooby Doo birthday treats and wedding day confections. Neighbors across the road won't even let their dogs drink it.

Supplied by a tiny and troubled utility, water in their Cedar Woods neighborhood is laced with arsenic at levels the state deemed unacceptable beginning in 2002. Repeatedly, state regulators have ordered the owner, pharmacist Alden King, to develop plans to clean it up. They have threatened him with fines. King missed state deadlines but never paid a cent. The water he pumps to close to 40 households remains contaminated.

"It's poison," said Marley, who has lived for 19 years in Cedar Woods, a mix of new and old manufactured homes in a rural stretch near Hickory, about 170 miles west of Raleigh. "I would have expected someone to step in and fix this."

Most people don't give water a second thought. They bathe in it, cook with it, give it to their children to drink. They trust their government to make sure their water is safe.

They are leaving a lot to chance.

A News & Observer investigation shows that the state agency responsible for making sure drinking water is safe isn't getting the job done. The Public Water Supply Section, with 98 employees, has been overwhelmed trying to monitor safety tests required of nearly 7,000 public water systems.

Those tests include checks for contaminants such as arsenic at Cedar Woods. Systems must also test for bacteria that can sicken or kill, but thousands of small systems don't obey laws requiring them to test their water and clean up contamination. The state has been unable to force compliance.

Jessica G. Miles, chief of the section, has repeatedly asked for help, but her requests for more people have been sidetracked by the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Governor's Office.

The state appropriates just $1.4 million a year -- 17 cents per person -- for Miles' budget. Most of her section's $10.6 million budget comes from federal and local money and from water system permit fees, which haven't been raised since they were instituted in 1992.

Immediate concern

North Carolina has more public water systems than any other Southern state and double the national average. Most are small mom-and-pop operations serving a few dozen to a few hundred people in rural neighborhoods or supplying water to schools, churches, day-care centers or small businesses in out-of-the-way places. Thousands of them aren't performing required tests, records show.

Bad water can kill quickly with bacteria, or it can kill slowly with arsenic or other contaminants. Lead, even in small amounts, can cause learning disabilities and behavioral problems in children.

Miles' immediate concern is bacterial contamination.

"That's what I worry about ... where you have somebody drink a glass of water and die," she said in an interview. "Or several people who drink a glass of water and die, and then we have the data to show that we knew that it was a problem."

Miles expressed confidence in the large public water systems, such as those in Raleigh or Durham. But she said if she were on the road in a rural area, she might not drink from a fountain at a gas station.

"I don't know if they're doing their testing or not,'' Miles said. "I might get the bottled water."

Until recently, it was impossible to know where all the problems were; employees were months behind in entering inspection records and test results. Documents in a Raleigh state office building were stacked on shelves or piled in boxes. Some documents needed to resolve violations might not have been missing. They just hadn't been filed.

Next page >