Stink being made about stinky water

BAYOU VISTA — Dozens of residents who get their water from Galveston County Municipal Utility District No. 12 are making a stink about smelly water. For weeks, many complain, a foul odor has been coming out of their taps and in many cases the water has a green or yellowish color to it.

Many are worried that the water may not be safe to drink.

“It’s been a nightmare,” Bayou Vista resident John Seaton said in an interview with KHOU-TV. “It changes sometimes, a bright orange, sometimes a stagnant green. I would like to say it smells like rotten eggs, but it really smells like sewage.”

While he stopped drinking the water, taking showers is another issue.

“You kind of have to stand under the shower with a pocket of air to breathe. Because it’s obnoxious,” he said.

Despite the odor, the water is safe to drink and the explanation why it has such an odor is simple, MUD No. 12 Board Chairman Bill Alcorn said.

MUD 12 provides water and sewer service for Bayou Vista, Original Bayou Vista and the La Marque subdivision of Omega Bay. Like other cities in the county, the utility district has been battling drought conditions. About two months ago, MUD 12 issued a Stage 1 voluntary water restrictions order that requests residents to limit their outdoor water usage.

At the same time, the utility district starting pumping water from a well it had built three years ago. It’s that ground water from the well that is to blame for the smell, Alcorn said.

“There’s nothing that can be done when you mix surface water and the ground water,” Alcorn said. “The mix of ground water gives you a musty smell, like a slight odor of dirty clothes.”

Alcorn said the water has been tested and he has assurances from the state’s environmental agency that the water is safe to drink and to bath.

A Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spokeswoman confirmed the water, while a bit stinky, is safe for human consumption and contact.

“Both our preliminary and follow-up bacterial testing results are negative meaning we have no indication that the water is unsafe,” TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said. “The (utility district) is working to correct the aesthetic issues.”

Alcorn said the district has few choices other than ask residents to bare with the smell for a while. To cut off the use of the ground water would mean the utility district would have to purchase extra surface water from the Gulf Coast Water Authority.

That, Alcorn said, would mean an increase in the water bill. MUD 12 customers pay $13.94 a month for the first 3,000 gallons of water and $2.71 per 1,000 gallons of water more than the initial 3,000 gallons.

The district is contracted to purchase about 295,000 gallons a day of surface water from the Gulf Coast Water Authority, Alcorn said. The district has for most the summer used almost every single drop of that initial allotment.

That’s why MUD 12 started to pump the well water into the system. Alcorn said the well was built for augmenting water use during drought conditions.

In May, the district pumped about 1 million of gallons from the well, that is located behind a real estate firm on Neptune. In June the well provided about 2 million gallons while so far this month another million gallons has been pulled from the well, Alcorn said.

The district is limited by the state to pull no more than 7.55 million gallons from the well in a year, Alcorn said.

“It’s either this or to pay a whole lot more for surface water or ban all outdoor water use,” Alcorn said. “That would mean closing the (Bayou Vista community) pool, no washing cars, no watering your lawns.”

Residents like Dean Chiles, who lives in Original Bayou Vista, complained that the utility district did not do a good enough job of informing residents what was happening.

Alcorn said he had posted an explanation on the online Bayou Vista message board last week. Chiles said he wasn’t aware of that and noted that the utility district did not provide a link on its own website or send notices to residents.

Likewise, the MUD did not provide even a reference to the smell problem on the digital message board outside the main offices on Neptune.

“The MUD board could have given us more information about all that was happening,” Chiles said. “I think a lot of people are upset because we weren’t given information.”

Alcorn hopes that the explanation provided during the public comment portion of Monday’s MUD Board meeting would ease concerns.

KHOU-TV, Ch. 11, contributed to this story through a content partnership with The Daily News.