“If you just taste it you can tell that th
ere’s something not right about the water,” senior Lydia Staub said about the water that comes out of Northwood water fountains.
Living in Pittsboro, Staub gets the same water at her house that comes through the sinks and fountains at Northwood. She says that at home, she only drinks water out of bottles.
“There are notices that come out about the water every couple months, talking about how there are things wrong with it,” Staub said.
She isn’t the only one who doesn’t drink the water; 44.8 percent of students said that they do not drink the water at Northwood.
The lack of students willing to satisfy their thirst at the school’s fountains most likely comes from the taste of the water. Even those students who are willing to drink the water aren’t crazy about the way it tastes.
“We had to drink it during basketball practice,” senior Shelby Wolfe said. “It tastes gross and it doesn’t taste like water.”
Wolfe also said that although she doesn’t drink the water anymore, she has friends who do, despite the undesirable taste.
“It’s the only water they can get for free so they just tolerate it,” Wolfe said.
Although there are a number of Northwood students who will not drink the water, science teacher Aaron Freeman is sure that the water is safe for human consumption. Although Freeman lives in Pittsboro, and has received the same water notices as Staub, she knows that the water has to be safe to drink or residents would know about it.
“Drinking water is monitored by the town of Pittsboro. We are provided with drinking water, so it must meet not only federal, but state guidelines in terms of content of harmful potential toxins,” Freeman said.
Pittsboro Water Treatment Center superintendent Scott Jewell says that Pittsboro’s water is safe for consumption, and the state is even “pleased” with what the treatment center has done with it. This is because the water hasn’t always been so safe.
“For the last 12 and a half years, the first 10 of that, Pittsboro was always in violation [of state guidelines],” Jewell said. “[But] for the last two and a half, we have not [had] any violations.”
The violation for those 10 years was in the form of a carcinogen, which has since been removed from the water by Jewell’s team through a series of chemical processes.
The town of Pittsboro comes with many challenges when it comes to water quality, challenges that are due to how the town receives its water.
“We pull out of the Haw River at the lowest part of the water shed before [the water] goes into Jordan Lake,” Jewell said. “So Pittsboro’s water is one of the most difficult types of water to treat.”
Despite the pollution problems that the water treatment facility has had to deal with, for the last two and a half years the water being produced has met federal and state guidelines.
So why are students still complaining?
“They complain about the taste. I also agree that the water at Northwood has a very metallic taste, [and] that could be from old piping,” Freeman said. “I don’t notice that same metallic taste at my house [where the pipes are] newer. So the pipes could just be old, or the water fountain could be old.”
Jewell agrees that the problem could very well be Northwood’s pipes, and for that matter, all of the pipes around town that distribute the water.
“Pittsboro has an aging infrastructure; all of the pipes that are underground have been there for 40 and 50 years,” Jewell said. “So that affects the taste, the odor and your water quality.
“When it leaves the plant, it’s great quality. But then when it goes though an aging infrastructure, it will have particles of the pipes that have been built up in the water that will slough off.”
Regardless of the cause of the problem, a large number of Northwood students still believe that the taste of the water is bad enough to keep them from drinking it.
Jewell reassures the community, however, that the water his plant is producing is not only safe, but also something that the community should be pleased with.
“The staff at our plant is so proud about what they’re doing. They work so hard at monitoring and are so concerned about our water quality. We’re absolutely proud of what we’re doing because the town has been in violation previous to the last two and a half years for so many years,” Jewell said.
–By Caroline Schneider