Uranium found in drinking water in Knightdale neighborhood

High levels of uranium were found in drinking water in a Knightdale neighborhood.

Customers in the Ashley Hills North community got two notices in the mail alerting them to their well water’s contamination.

On Friday, Carolina Water Service confirmed to WRAL News that the water is safe to use. It said it shut off the well that had high uranium levels. But the utility only tests uranium levels once a year, so neighbors here are wondering how long the water was unsafe.

Letters delivered to mailboxes earlier this week show that high levels of uranium and radiation were detected in the water in early February. Data on the utility’s website showed an earlier test was above the accepted standard in January.

Neighbors want to know if they weren't alerted sooner.

One-year-old Mason isn’t a fan of drinking water yet. He’s more of a milk guy.  His mom even got a Bluey cup to try to get him hydrated. 

But after receiving two notices in the mail from Carolina Water Service of high uranium and gross alpha radiation levels in her tap water, she’s thankful for her son’s stubborn streak.

"My concern is that over the year of his life, when I was making his bottles with formula, I was using tap water to mix the formula," said Taylor Hines. "So that is my real fear, is that did he have that exposure?"

Unsafe uranium exposure, especially to the young and old, can lead to kidney disease, among other health problems. So Hines called her pediatrician and is having a toxicity test of Mason’s kidneys and is awaiting the results.

There’s no alert on the utility’s website or notice about the unsafe uranium levels on her account.

The letters alerting her to the issue look identical but show separate violations – one for a test finding uranium levels of 250 pci per liter in her water, 12 times higher than the standard of 20.1 The second letter has to do with overall radiation testing, which includes the uranium results.

"There's a lot of acronyms and abbreviations, and it's very hard to tell what means what," Hines said. "So my frustration there is that while I have the information, I don't know how to decipher it, so that leaves more questions as well."

Hines called the number on the bottom of the notice, and a customer service representative told her this is the well in question – well 3 – which is just across the street from her neighborhood. We reached out to Carolina Water Service to ask her questions – when will the water be safe to drink, how did this happen and what is being done to fix it.

In response to our questions, Carolina Water Service provided this statement, saying in part, "We take our responsibility to our customers and their water quality seriously. As soon as we received the results for our required annual testing, we took the affected well offline. Well 3 is not being used as a source for water service. Two other wells serve this area, and those wells are in compliance and have adequate supply to serve customers." 

WRAL News looked through five years of annual testing on that well, and uranium was never an issue.