SUMTER, SC (WIS) -
The Nivens family has bathed regularly for the past 10 weeks, but that doesn't mean they feel very clean.
In that span of time, the Nivens say they have had to take showers in yellowish and reddish-brown water.
"When it's really bad you don't want to take a bath in it, and you don't want to drink it," Lisa Taylor said.
Across the street from the Nivens, the Taylor family has had nearly the same issue. They've been making do with other sources of water, such as bottled water and filtered water from the fridge.
The city's been troubleshooting for several weeks and tried flushing the lines.
"That did not work and that's where over the last week we got more involved and we really got aggressive with it and we realized those lines in the back of the subdivision were likely creating the problem," Al Harris, the assistant manager for Sumter public services, said.
New construction, but not enough of it in the back of the Foxcroft subdivision, caused water to sit in the lines.
"The water sits there and becomes a little bit stagnated," said Harris. "There's nothing wrong with it. The chlorine levels are good, the iron is not extremely high, the PH is good."
As they started flushing lines on Friday, iron levels were at .27 around 1:30 PM. At 4:30 PM, they'd fallen to .19 and were down to .09 that night. On Monday morning, they were down to .07. The acceptable average is .30 and at the height, city levels topped that slightly at .32. Now the city may continue to periodically flush the lines, until more homes are built.
"As a precaution, even if it doesn't show up as bad we'll go back and do it again anyway so we won't have any problems," said Harris.
Many neighbors believe the city owes them a break on the bill.
"I don't want to pay for dirty water, so I'm hoping they resolve this issue pretty quickly," Lisa said.
The city considers the problem fixed, but residents are still holding their breath and crossing their fingers that this fix holds.
Copyright 2012 WIS. All rights reserved.
