Worried about your water? We checked, and here’s what we found in Fort Mill, Tega Cay

From Flint, Mich., to Fort Mill, South Carolina, water quality this past year has been a subject of public interest perhaps more than any other.

When the utility Carolina Water Service released results from Jan. 27 tests that showed the Foxwood and River Hills subdivisions in Fort Mill and Lake Wylie registered amounts of lead that exceeded a federal safety standard, some residents voiced concerns. Officials said they believed the lead – up to four times above the federal standard – corroded off of pipes that serve homes in the three subdivisions.

Given Carolina Water Service’s poor track record in Tega Cay, where the city eventually bought out the utility after years of serious sewage spills into Lake Wylie, it was understandably a sore subject around here.

In an effort to find out the level of anxiety over drinking water in the Fort Mill Township area and gather some data on water quality, we reached out to residents over social media. We asked anyone with concerns who would be interested in having their water tested free of charge and talk to us about their fears to contact us. Over the course of several weeks, we selected residents with homes in the older section of Tega Cay that used to be served by CWS, downtown Fort Mill, Foxwood, Baxter Village and a town home complex near the Springfield community.

The big reveal

The bottom line: We found no contamination in any of the samples. That said, there were a couple of instances in which levels of certain elements were higher than in samples taken elsewhere, but still within acceptable limits. We also had one apparent false positive. A sample showed potentially dangerous levels of a substance in an initial test, but another taken at the same home a couple of days later was negative.

Some concerns

One of the residents who responded to our social media posts, Susan Danese, splits her time between Syracuse, N.Y., and her home in Fort Mill. She said she became concerned because her water seemed different after returning to Fort Mill from one of those trips.

“When we got back three weeks later, there was mold in the toilet,” Danese said.

“When I put water into a cup, you get this brown stuff, clumps of stuff. I’ve never bought bottled water before, but now I buy bottled water. When my grand kids are here and I’m making macaroni and cheese for them, I use bottled water.”

Like the other tests, those at Danese’s home were negative.

Bob Miller of Tega Cay has similar complaints about discolored and sometimes slimy water. Tests at his home were negative and about two months after our visit we checked in with him to see if he’s still concerned.

“Have not had any further issues and are drinking from the tap,” Miller wrote in an email.

The team

For this project, the Fort Mill Times teamed up Dawn Tongson, occupation environmental science teacher at Fort Mill High School, and two of her students. At her suggestion, the testing kits we purchased for the project were made by a U.S. company called TestAssured. Primarily, she liked the kit’s versatility. You can learn more about them in another story linked below.

In addition to the residential tests, Fort Mill Times reporter John Marks, who has won major awards over the years for his coverage of the sewage spills in Tega Cay and environmental reporting about issues affecting the Catawba River and Lake Wylie, took and tested samples from those two bodies and wrote a story about the results. Marks also wrote a piece explaining the annually water quality reports published by local municipalities in this newspaper.

You can click the links below to read them.

Before you read on, though, we want to be clear that in no way do we present this as a scientific report. We’re not experts in the field of water quality and draw no conclusions. We simply wanted to satisfy our curiosity about what residents think about their tap water and see what results we would get with an easy-to-use testing kit in various parts of Fort Mill Township.

Anyone with concerns over their water should contact their provider and the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. And please keep us in the loop, too!

This story was originally published November 7, 2016 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Worried about your water? We checked, and here’s what we found in Fort Mill, Tega Cay."