Ongoing water woes impact northeast Arkansas residents

LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — Utility customers for Cross County Rural Water System said they are consistently facing issues with water discoloration.

Kim McFadden, a resident of McCrory Arkansas said she was in shock when she went to check on her hot tub water last Friday and noticed it was brown.

"I just walked in and I said, you can't bathe in this," McFadden said. "It just looked like it came from a ditch, it was just nasty water."

McFadden said the water issue is "a never-ending cycle" for her and other customers of the Cross County Rural Water System.

McFadden said she's had to throw light clothes away due to discoloration and noted she does not feel safe to drink the water.

"They do come out and flush the lands occasionally," McFadden said. "When they do the water does clear up but then it comes right back in a couple of weeks, so it's just it's not a good situation."

David King, executive director and manager at Cross County Rural Water System, said he is upset these issues keep impacting customers.

"I want to apologize to everyone who's got brown water," King said. "This is not something we want to do. We want to fix this in a timely manner, but our hands are tied on how fast we can work."

King said they've had several issues over the past few years that impacted the maintenance of the water system.

"When COVID hit, we didn't have time to do the maintenance on all our stuff and we couldn't get parts in to correct problems," King said.

King said after the pandemic the federal government implemented a plan to give people access to the internet, which created more work for their already limited staff.

"They came in and they said we're gonna put fiber down here, even though my water line was there," King said. "There's one two-and-a-half mile section, a two-inch line that cut 26 times so that took up our day."

King said the utility company is a non-profit and that he's applied for several grants but has not received them.

"The water bill that we bill to the customer is the only income that we have coming in," King said. "We don't get any tax money, evidently we get no grants-- it's strictly water usage."

King said they applied for a loan through the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission months ago but they have not received it yet.

In addition, he said the company would keep doing what it could with the resources they had.

"All we can do is just hang out and ride the storm, as bad as I hate to say that," King said.