EXCLUSIVE | Millsboro residents raise concerns over murky, stinky tap water
Millsboro residents are raising concerns over murky tap water, a problem they say affects the way they cook, bathe, and do laundry.
“I won’t even feed my cat the water that comes out of my spigot,” explained Jennifer Taylor, a resident of the Kyle Circle community in Millsboro.
For over a year Taylor and her family have experienced issues with their water, but over time the problem has progressively worsened.
“The water is yellow, sometimes brown, so much so that it stains your sinks and tubs,” Taylor said. “It has a foul smell to it. Recently, it’s just started smelling like rotten eggs. Everytime I pay my water bill I tell them something’s wrong with the water, it doesn’t smell well, it doesn’t taste good, but they tell us that it’s fine.”
Michael Smith, who lives off New Street in Millsboro, also expressed deep concerns with the quality of his family’s tap water. He took to social media with a video showing how his water comes out looking dehydrated urine.
“It literally looks like a yellowish urine, like a brownish, yellowish urine,” Smith explained. “It’s like dirt. It’s getting darker and darker when we turn the water on, and I got a six year old granddaughter that takes baths, she’s gotta bathe in that? Our water is horrible.”
“I wanna see something done about it,” Smith said. “Just fix it.”
Also experiencing issues with drinking water quality is Elizabeth Colegrove, who also lives in the Kyle Circle community of Millsboro. She says she spends upwards of $50 per month on bottled water.
“The odor is terrible,” Colegrove said. “I even hate washing my clothes in it, but I have no options. I spend anywhere from $40-45 a month on bottled water.”
Colegrove said she raised the issue to a town employee when she paid her water bill, but wasn’t taken seriously.
“I told the girl in there the water’s terrible, you can’t drink it,” Colegrove said. “She said ‘well, I drink it’ and I told her she was braver than I was because there’s no way I would drink that water.”
WGMD News reached out to the Town of Millsboro and spoke to Town Manager Sheldon Hudson, who said town officials performed routine flushing to the water system last week and received some complaints over the water quality.
“The Town did do some flushing activities last week, nothing out of the ordinary in that regard, but sometimes when we do flushing, which is as you know pretty routine to eliminate any iron that’s built up in the system, especially around the hydrants, sometimes that can end up displacing any iron that’s in the system and as a result we’ll get some discolored water complaints,” Hudson explained. “I know we did receive a few last week, but nothing that’s out of the ordinary certainly and no concerns relative to water quality or anything of that sort.”
The municipal water system is often tested weekly, more so than most private household wells would be, according to Hudson, who said he lives in town with his family and drinks the water.
“I live in town, I have minor children, in fact my eight-year-old daughter uses the water as well,” Hudson explained. “I always tell people that because that attempts to put them at ease when they know that the Town Manager lives in town and his kids use the water just like they do.”
