ELLENBORO — Mark Parsons and his wife live on a 150-acre farm in Ritchie County, raising cattle, guinea hens and chickens.
They’re also raising their two young children, a family and business plan they’ve long had to stay in their native state after meeting at West Virginia University. They bought the farm, which has been in his wife’s family since the 1960s, four years ago.
“We love West Virginia and we wanted to make this our home,” Parsons said.
Then in March, during a community meeting about water quality, Parsons learned several residents across the Highland, Hebron and Bonds Creek communities had discovered arsenic and lead in their well water. Now, the Parsons family is wondering if they can stay.
“The farm is a lifelong investment for us, and water is just such an essential part,” added Parsons. “But it’s become a huge concern for us overnight basically, and we’re considering all options.”
Concerns over water quality are common in West Virginia as communities across the state wrestle with issues affecting their drinking water, often causing them to turn to bottled water. Several communities have struggled with polluted water sources while others deal with discolored or smelly city water due to aging water systems.
The recent revelation has made the need for a water system for the communities outside Ellenboro and Pennsboro even more critical as both arsenic and lead can have adverse effects on human health, including cancer and high blood pressure.
The added urgency has county and local officials scrambling to find the funding to connect the areas to the city water in Pennsboro, which would serve at least 70 households or several hundred people, estimated Pennsboro Mayor Robert Riggs.
“It’s not 60 or 70 people, it’s a few hundred people that are affected by this,” Riggs said. “There’s no excuse that we cannot get water to the people that need it.”
Earlier this month, more than 50 residents attended a community meeting in the Ellenboro Municipal Center’s gymnasium to get updates from local leaders. Riggs, who’s spearheading the effort, was accompanied by several other county and local officials, including Ellenboro Mayor Steve Lewis and Ritchie County Commissioners Randall Riggs and Steve Ritter.
Mayor Riggs told residents that the water system would likely cost around $7.1 million and that he and local leaders were exploring all possible funding options.
“The people at this table have been working diligently trying to find funding from the state and federal sources to get you all water,” Riggs said.
While they work to find more funding, they have secured some money for the project. Riggs told residents that the Ritchie County Commission allocated $30,000 to design the water system in its 2024-2025 budget, which residents expressed gratitude for.
Discovery of the polluted well water came after residents inquired about Pennsboro’s ongoing water line project. Currently, the town is extending its existing water system further up State Route 74 to service more households.
“Can I get in on that Route 74 water project?” resident Beverly Hayes recalled asking Riggs when she found out about the extension.
“I said, ‘Is there any way that you could bring this project that you’re doing into our community? Because I really have a need for water and I would like to have it,” she added.
Hayes was just one of many who asked Riggs if they could be added to the ongoing water project. Because of the high demand, Riggs began looking into it, which prompted the testing of some residents’ water.
Of 22 water samples, 18 tested positive for arsenic, and 14 tested positive for lead. While most samples were only tested for arsenic, lead and copper, some residents opted to do additional testing, which found methane gas in one sample and E. coli in another.
Several of the results showed levels of arsenic slightly higher than the standard for drinking water set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While naturally occurring, arsenic can cause cancer and long-term exposure can result in skin and lung cancer as well as diabetes and lung and heart disease.
Unlike arsenic, there is no safe amount of lead in drinking water. The EPA’s standard for lead in drinking water is set at zero because it’s a “toxic metal that can be harmful to human health even at low exposure levels.”
While lead is harmful to everyone, children and infants are most vulnerable because they can be impacted by lower levels of lead than adults, causing a variety of physical and behavioral impacts. Lead exposure in adults can impact blood pressure and kidney function and cause reproductive problems.
“Clean, safe water,” said Hayes. “That’s all we want.”