It’s not just you. Raleigh’s water tastes and smells a bit musty.
Social media and NextDoor mailing lists filled with questions about the taste and smell of the city’s water.
The good news is that the earthy aroma and taste should disappear this week.
The water is safe to drink and usable for cooking, cleaning and showering, according to a notice on the city of Raleigh’s website. It exceeds regulatory standards for safety and is properly disinfected, said Ed Buchan, Raleigh Water Resources Manager.
“We really do everything we can to produce the best water possible,” he said. “And we apologize, hiccup, if you want to call it that.” And we will take steps to ensure that this does not happen in the future. »
Buchan lives a few miles from the Falls Lake water plant, where the town gets about 80 percent of its water. His water tasted good and he was caught off guard by the number of complaints he received over the weekend. Raleigh also draws water from Lake Benson.
“I hear you all say it’s safe but it’s totally undrinkable,” Katy Bauer said on the city’s Facebook page. “I have never had this problem with our tap water and have lived in Raleigh for almost 20 years.”
Another Raleigh resident, Amy Mayhew, said she never remembers water “tasting like dirt” in her 25 years of living in Raleigh.
The water culprit
The culprit is a change in algae and “algae activity” in Falls Lake. When algae decomposes, it can change the taste and odor of city water.
“There will always be algae in the lake water,” Buchan said. “It’s just a natural phenomenon. But in this case, it was an incredibly high level that we haven’t seen, to my knowledge, since we’ve been researching this stuff. So this is an incredibly unique situation for us.
The cause of the increase in algae numbers is unknown, he said, but it could be due to the hot, dry weather of the past month.
Raleigh has added activated carbon and advanced ozone oxidation to minimize the odor and taste, but it will take a few days to purge the system. The city is in the process of updating its powdered activated carbon system to meet still chemicals in drinking waterand this new system should also help reduce the increase in algae numbers.
On its website, the city says some customers have improved the taste and smell of water with a lemon wedge and that home filtration systems with fresh charcoal can reduce the taste.
The city provides water and sewer services to more than 600,000 residents, including Raleigh, Garner, Knightdale, Rolesville, Wake Forest, Wendell and Zebulon. The city has more than 2,700 miles of water pipes.
Raleigh Water won first place in the 2023 American Water Works Association of North Carolina competition and continued to third place in the “Best of the Best Water Taste Test” at the international conference.
