Three years ago, the Prices discovered that their Wake County well had been polluted with a colorless liquid used in the manufacture of gasoline, insecticides and other products.

They learned that they should limit their showers to five minutes, that they should not drink water from their taps or cook with it -- and that their government had known for seven years about polluted wells nearby but hadn't warned them or their neighbors.

"I hope and pray that no one has developed cancer from this,'' said state Rep. Bernard Allen, a Beechwood Park neighbor whose well also was contaminated. "Some people have lived in the neighborhood for many, many years, and that's all the water that they've used. God forbid if that water was contaminated 25, 30 years ago."

After the pollution seeped into his neighborhood off Poole Road near the Neuse River, Allen tried to strengthen laws protecting private well owners. He wanted the state to require tests of private wells prior to sale or rental of property. And he wanted to require regulators to notify nearby property owners when they discovered contamination.

He failed. The bill he introduced last year, opposed by real estate interests because of the cost, didn't get a hearing. Well owners still aren't told of nearby well contamination, and North Carolinians continue to drink water from private wells that are seldom, if ever, tested.

The state requires vehicle owners to get their cars and trucks inspected annually to make sure the horn honks and other equipment does what it's supposed to. It regulates sewage disposal. But at least three attempts during the past 15 years to require even minimal testing of private wells have been defeated.

Private well pollution is not just a problem in rural counties. About 93,000 residents of Wake County get water from private wells, and 650 to 700 new wells are drilled in the county each year. Greg Bright, Wake's groundwater program supervisor, said most of the existing wells have never been tested.

"Just to make a wild guess, I'd probably say at least three-quarters of them have never been tested, and that may be conservative," he said.

The state started regulating well construction in 1972. But only eight employees have been assigned to enforce those regulations statewide.

"I can assure you that the state of North Carolina doesn't have sufficient staff to go out and actually check wells for construction," said Hope Taylor-Guevara, executive director of Clean Water for North Carolina, an environmental group that supported Allen's bill.

Five years ago, the state agency responsible for protecting groundwater asked to hire nine more people and to help more counties start programs to regulate wells. But it was a tough budget year, and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said no. Gov. Mike Easley never saw the request; nor did legislators, who make the final decision. The agency has not tried again.

Thirty-five counties have some sort of construction oversight or well-testing program, but only 14 require even minimal tests. In the other 65 counties, well drillers are on the honor system when it comes to construction standards.

"That's like putting up speed limits but not setting anything up to regulate drivers," said B.K. Jones, a former Richmond County environmental health supervisor responsible for well inspections. "If we knew there was no Highway Patrol, how many of us would drive at 65 miles per hour?"

Public systems safer

When private wells are tested, contamination is found routinely.

The N.C. State Laboratory of Public Health, in Raleigh, tests for bacteria in more than 500 private well-water samples that county health departments send each month. Those tests show that water from public systems is safer than water from private wells.

For the past seven years, almost 30 percent of the tests of private wells have been positive for total coliform bacteria. With a few exceptions, these bacteria are harmless micro-organisms, but their presence indicates that the water might have been contaminated with feces from humans or other warm-blooded animals.

When a test is positive for total coliform, the state lab follows up with a test that looks for fecal coliform and its most common member, E. coli. A positive fecal/E. coli test means the presence of bacteria or viruses that might sicken or kill. Then it's time to start boiling the water.

Over the years, the state lab has found fecal/E. coli in about 1 of every 30 private well samples. During that same period, labs that test samples from public water systems have found fecal/E. coli in about 1 in every 780 samples.

The private well samples tested by the state lab are not random. Some samples came from wells where members of a family already were sick, and some from wells flooded after a hurricane. But while the number of samples analyzed varied widely from year to year, the ratio of E. coli-positive samples has never dropped below 1 in 45.

Tests of new wells in Wake County reveal the same problem: about 1 in 80 are contaminated with E. coli.

Bill Holman, former secretary of environment and natural resources and now executive director of the state's Clean Water Management Trust Fund, says North Carolina's failure to protect either groundwater quality or private wells is "one of the biggest missing gaps" in its health system.

A creeping danger

Some contaminants, such as bacteria, can sicken or kill a family within days.

Of the 14 counties that require testing of private wells, only four look for anything other than bacteria. But scores of other contaminants, over time, are just as dangerous. Most are colorless, odorless and tasteless, so there's no warning. Like cigarette smoke, they kill so slowly that people don't notice.

The danger comes both from man-made sources and the curses of nature. The state has documented more than 25,000 known soil and water contamination sites, including contaminants such as the 1,2-Dichloropropane that poisoned the Prices' well off Poole Road near Raleigh. And there are natural killers such as arsenic, which exists in soil and minerals and can dissolve into well water.

Charles G. Pippin is a hydrogeologist in the state Division of Water Quality's office in Mooresville. He calculates that the chances of drilling a well in the Triangle and getting water with a detectable -- and therefore dangerous -- level of arsenic ranges from 2 percent in Franklin to 38 percent in Chatham.

In the two most arsenic-prone counties in the state, Stanly and Union, Pippin says the chances of finding arsenic in well water are more than 50 percent.

Radiological contaminants leaching from granite can also poison groundwater; in North Carolina, eastern Wake County is ground zero. Uranium and radium show up in public water systems in east Wake far more often than anywhere else.

Private well owners should take that as a warning, says William E. Grantmyre, former president of Heater Utilities Inc. in Cary. Heater owned about 480 public water systems -- 175 in Wake County -- prior to its sale in 2004.

"There are thousands of wells in eastern Wake, and they [the owners] don't have a clue," said Grantmyre, now an attorney on the Public Staff at the N.C. Utilities Commission. "I'm not saying it's in 50 percent of the wells, but it's a lot."

Natural contamination

A geological formation called the Rolesville outcrop -- essentially a block of granite -- is the source of the radiological contamination in Wake. In the eastern third of the county, even amateur spotters can see huge granite outcroppings exposed on the surface, up to half the size of a football field. Much of this granite contains uranium or its "children," including radium 226 and 228. Water passing through crevices in the rock picks up these contaminants.

Wake County normally tests for 18 contaminants before it allows a new well to be used, but it does not require tests for radiological elements.

Wake County charges $400 for a well permit and, by most accounts, it has the best well-construction inspection and testing program in the state. Since 2003, the county has required that new wells be tested not only for bacteria but also for nitrates, nitrites, lead, arsenic, hardness, iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc and copper. If there's a gas station nearby, the county might require a test to determine whether fuel has leaked into the groundwater.

If the well flunks, the developer or owner must fix the problem, usually with a filter, before the house can be occupied.

Wake might soon require a test for radiological contaminants. The county is in the closing months of a three-year study of radon in the air and water -- and it's finding plenty in eastern Wake.

For Wake's stepped up well-testing program, thank Jerry and Mary Price and their neighbors in the Beechwood Park subdivision.

Through the trees beside their house at the end of Ann Avenue, the Prices can see two houses on Poole Road whose owners were told in 1996 that their well water was polluted. But no one told the Prices or their neighbors in the 20-home community. State law doesn't require it.

Had it not been for research to win an unrelated zoning battle, they might never have found out their own well had been polluted.

"Once we found out our wells were contaminated, we went into action," said Jerry Price, the founding pastor of Solid Rock Baptist Church, three or four minutes from their house.

"We tried to find anybody that we could to help us," Mary Price said. "And we started calling everybody."

The Prices are retired educators, she from the Wake County Public School System and he from the state Department of Correction. They searched through government records and discovered contamination that the state, and Wake County, had known about all along. They organized the neighborhood. They confronted state and local officials. They got the problem fixed: Raleigh extended its water line into their neighborhood.

Several people in the neighborhood do have cancer, according to the Prices.

"We do not know whether it's connected," Mary Price said. "But we know from the research that we've done that some of these chemicals can cause cancer."

Allen's bill, co-sponsored by seven other representatives, would have required tests of private wells before property could be leased or sold.

"Personally, I don't think that's asking too much, to make sure our citizens are drinking good water," Allen said.

The House Health Committee chairman, Thomas E. Wright of Wilmington, said Allen's bill had great merit.

"I think the question came down to, who was going to bear the cost of paying for the tests? Would it be the seller, the buyer, the developer, the Realtor?"

Paul Wilms, director of governmental affairs for the N.C. Home Builders Association, said his organization would not automatically oppose rules requiring statewide inspection or permitting of wells. But the builders had several problems with Allen's proposal, Wilms said.

For one, the cost of the water tests the bill would require is not clear. Nor was it certain that state-certified labs would have the capacity to process them quickly enough not to impede home sales, he said.

Wilms also has questions about a provision that would force disclosure to the state and nearby property owners after contamination is discovered in a well. If the contamination wasn't at dangerous levels, the market value of several properties might fall unfairly, he said.

A push for testing

Proponents of mandatory tests for private wells have tried for a state standard at least three times since 1991. Top officials at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources say they will push private-well-testing legislation again when the General Assembly returns May 9.

Terry L. Pierce, director of the department's Division of Environmental Health, told legislators in December that water suitable for human consumption is his No. 1 health priority. During his 25 years in the public health field, he said, he has been intrigued by how much effort is spent on enforcement of rules governing the disposal of sewage that comes out of rural houses and how little is spent protecting private wells.

Pierce said in an interview that a bill requiring tests of private wells had never passed in part because people at his level and others had not done a good job educating the legislature and the public.

"I think people have the misconception that it's being done already," he said. "If you would ask the average person in one of these counties that do not have a well program if their well was checked, I'll bet you they'll tell you it was. 'Oh, I'm sure the health department looked at it.' "

Rep. Pryor A. Gibson III of Wadesboro, co-chairman of a panel that reviews environmental policy, said he has fussed about the safety of private wells for years.

"It's a shortcoming in our environmental policy that we've never had a statewide well-testing program," Gibson said. "There is a high percentage of North Carolinians who live out in the country, particularly in central North Carolina, who have never had their wells tested, and they are unaware that because of our geography that there are some places that have some stuff that's not good for you."

Gibson represents Union County, southeast of Charlotte, where well drillers have a 50-50 chance of finding water with arsenic in concentrations of 1 part per billion or more, according to estimates by Pippin, the state hydrogeologist.

Gibson said legislators will look at a testing bill this year.

"It's not going to be cheap," he said. "We can't make counties fund things they can't afford to do, so we need to find the money."

THE FIRST OF THREE PARTS

(Staff writer Catherine Clabby, database editor David Raynor and news researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)