Water troubles in rural Waterproof, Louisiana, deepen infrastructure crisis

Waterproof, Louisiana, has experienced outages involving its water supply, causing residents to turn on the tap only to find nothing dripping out repeatedly, sometimes for weeks at a time or even longer despite "water" being in the name of the village.

Less than a mile from the banks of the Mississippi River in rural northeast Louisiana, Marcella Rollins has turned her passion for Mexican cooking into a small business, selling tacos, quesadillas, and other items out of a food truck in the small town.

In a remote community where Main Street is lined with decaying buildings and there are no supermarkets or restaurants for miles in any direction, Rollins' taqueria on wheels does not have much competition, but a lack of grocery options in Waterproof is far from the only topic of concern on the minds of local residents.

"It's more than just a pain," Rollins told ABC News Senior National Correspondent Steve Osunsami. "It's a lot of suffering because of the work that is being put into being able to get water in the home."

Rollins said that previous water outages caused her family to have to live in a motel for two months just to be able to shower, with other instances requiring her to fill milk jugs with water from an emergency mobile tank known as a water buffalo or to drive long distances to find a place to buy bottled water.

Keeping her food truck business afloat requires water for cooking and sanitation, but the instability of the water supply in Waterproof means that Rollins' ability to make a living can often be in jeopardy.

"I would expect to lose water three or four more times this year," Rollins said. "You have to always be prepared."

Waterproof without water

Waterproof's water issues have been caused by a number of factors, according to local officials. A brief outage in March was the result of a computer glitch, while there have also been concerns over water leaking out of the elevated water tank that towers over the village.

However, Mayor Jarrod Bottley says that the longer gaps in water service have been the result of breaks in the aging pipe that transports water more than a dozen miles underneath Tensas Parish from the Tensas Water Distribution Association near Lake Bruin.

Since Waterproof is at the very end of one of the parish's two main water lines, a leak in the pipe, even miles outside of town limits, can cause residents of the village and other areas served by the same line to have no water coming out of their faucets, according to Bottley, who explained that his house is impacted by the water outages just like the homes of his fellow residents.

"It's becoming a norm for me to get up in the morning and twist the knob, and [there's] no water," Bottley said.

Even when utility workers fix the leaks and turn the water back on, the people in Waterproof are the last to see water. It can take days for the water to return to residents at the end of the water line.

One of the most recent extended outages occurred last Christmas when freezing temperatures plagued parts of the South.

"I think that moment will forever linger in my head," Bottley said. "It started Christmas Eve, and it lingered on over, and then it came again. People were in town, the streets were full, households were packed. People were cooking, the aroma of foods was high in the air, and all of a sudden, in the middle of cooking, we were waterless."

Only around 600 people still live in Waterproof, but despite the declines in population and the local tax base, Bottley said the infrastructure still needs the same level of maintenance, if not more given the age of the system. "I'm supplying to the same linear mileage," Bottley said. "Although it's less people, I'm covering the same geographical area but with less revenue."

As Waterproof shrinks, another part of Louisiana grows

While Waterproof has had to contend with a dwindling number of residents with most who remain struggling to make ends meet, across the state in the more affluent parish of St. Tammany, the opposite is true.

St. Tammany Parish's population has surged to over 273,000 as of July 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with an increasing number of New Orleans-area residents deciding that a lengthy commute on I-10 or over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is worth it to live in relatively new neighborhoods with large properties surrounded by trees.

However, despite the vast differences between the two communities, conversations among St. Tammany residents often include a similar topic as conversations among Waterproof residents – water infrastructure.

Boil water advisories and other alerts in St. Tammany are far from uncommon. Residents of the parish even created a Facebook group to discuss concerns about their water supply with each other. A common complaint from residents in some parts of the parish is that their water sometimes has a brown color.

"It was, I think, half tongue in cheek, but people are talking about calling the United Nations to come in and give us the same clean water that they're doing for third world countries," St. Tammany resident Tim Burke said.

Burke, a New Orleans native, said he has spent thousands of dollars to try to ensure that the house he bought three years ago has clean water, even purchasing a $4,000 water filtration system, paying for annual maintenance of the system, and replacing appliances.

"We're fortunate we had the resources to do it, but not everyone does," Burke said. "We had to do what we had to do to get the clean water."

St. Tammany Parish President Mike Cooper said that the parish, which was primarily rural until the last few decades, does not have a utilities system covering its entire area and instead has a number of different government-run and private firms providing water to residents.

"For many years, growth has been outpacing investment in infrastructure," Cooper told ABC News, adding that a lot of the boil water advisories in St. Tammany are being caused by contractors breaking water lines. "For too long, there was no reinvestment into our water and sewage utility systems."

Although many residents have voiced concerns, Cooper maintains that the water in St. Tammany is safe to drink, noting that the Louisiana Department of Health conducts regular water sampling and that the parish government has a large team of engineers and licensed water operators.

"A drop in water pressure causes an alert to the citizens that it's an advisory. It's simply an advisory. It does not mean that the water's not safe to drink," Cooper said. "We monitor our water systems as well, and if there's ever a time that the water has to be taken out of service, we will do so."

'All hands on deck'

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives a report card every year for the nation's water infrastructure, and Louisiana gets a near failing grade, a D-. Nine other states earned similar grades.

The ASCE says that a water main break occurs somewhere in the country every two minutes, causing billions of gallons of water to go to waste.

In Flint, Michigan, contamination in the city's water supply made headlines around the world after officials switched the water source in an attempt to save money on infrastructure, and in Houston, Texas, one of the largest cities in the country, all it took was a power outage for millions of residents to have to be placed on a boil water advisory last November.

Just 80 miles northeast of Mayor Bottley's office in Waterproof, Jackson, Mississippi received widespread attention last August and last December due to major water outages, with Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba stating that decades worth of "deferred maintenance" and a lack of capital improvements placed Jackson in a vulnerable situation.

Jackson is now expected to receive $800 million in federal funds to help address its municipal water issue, Mayor Lumumba said in January.

Bottley says that he and his residents sympathize with what happened in Jackson, but wish their small community could see an influx of resources and national awareness given what Mississippi's capital city has received.

"I hate what happened to them," Bottley said, but added, "What Jackson is going through, we go through this five to seven times a year."

To Bottley, small towns with limited budgets such as Waterproof that have aging infrastructure just like cities and suburbs should be allocated their fair share of support, particularly with regard to water infrastructure and associated staffing challenges.

"However, I feel that bigger metropolitan areas have at minimum 10 engineers on staff to do this work every day. Smaller rural communities don't have an engineer on staff. We have one that's available to do the basic work. But when you go over basic, you've got to pay for this out of pocket," Bottley said.

Federal and state authorities are now awarding both Tensas Parish, where Waterproof is located, and St. Tammany Parish, on the other side of the state, millions of dollars to improve their water infrastructure. The money is coming from the Louisiana Water Sector Commission's use of American Rescue Plan funds. However, the funds won't be enough to cover a full rehabilitation of the water systems in each parish.

"With the ARPA money, it has given us an opportunity to really invest where the needs are, and it's across St. Tammany Parish," Cooper said, explaining that the parish government was able to put resources into applying for the funds through an "all hands on deck" in-house effort.

Greg DiLoreto, a former president of ASCE, has one potential solution to fixing aging water systems – raising water rates.

"We're not going to be able to get this from some magic wand or somebody else that pays for it," DiLoreto said. "It's you and I that use the system that are going to have to be paying for it."

That may be a tough sell to Americans, particularly those already struggling to pay their bills, but DiLoreto says that in order to improve the water supply, there might not be any other choice.

He added that 88 percent of Americans pay less for water than what it actually costs to provide this vital service and that out of the 2.2 million miles of drinking water lines in the country, more than half need repair.

DiLoreto says finding the next city at risk of a water system failure is as simple as following the lack of money.

"If you want to look for the next problem, just look at the places that aren't investing. Look at the places maybe that brag, 'You know what, we haven't raised our water rates in 15 years. Boy, we're doing a great job," DiLoreto said.

In St. Tammany, could higher water bills be on the horizon in their future?

"We'll be evaluating our rates as we continue to expand our systems," Cooper said, noting increased costs for maintenance and environmental requirements. "It's hard to be able to transfer those costs directly onto our citizens, to the ratepayers," he said.

'We should be able to have it accessible to us too'

While St. Tammany's growth continues, back in Waterproof, Bottley says he sometimes gets calls from people whose families moved out of Waterproof years ago who want to come back home. One of the first questions they ask is whether the village can provide their homes with safe, clean, and consistent running water.

"As the mayor, one thing I never want to do is to lie to a current citizen or a potential citizen," Bottley said. "I always want my words to be 100 percent correct, so at that point, I gasp, and I think, 'How can I answer this?'"

He usually tells them that if they are looking to move back within six months, "the answer's automatically no," but if it is more than five years, Bottley believes many of the current issues could be fixed by then.

Until that happens, longtime Waterproof residents like Marcella Rollins will continue to wonder whether water will come out of the faucet each time they turn on the tap. Rollins says cooking for her community from her food truck is living her dream, but especially given the bills she pays, she would like to have reliable clean water for her family and her business.

"If it's available [in] other places, we should be able to have it accessible to us too," Rollins said.