SLIDELL, La. — For years, residents have been complaining about St. Tammany Parish’s well-based water system in the Cross Gates area east of Slidell, which serves about 10,000 people.
They said their tap water was often brown and undrinkable. They reported skin rashes when they bathed in it. Many homeowners spent thousands of dollars on whole-house water filtration systems. Others moved away and reported their skin conditions cleared up once they were on a different public water system, even in the same parish.
Last fall, the area in and around Cross Gates elected two new parish council members, David Cougle and Jeff Corbin. They wasted no time addressing the water-quality issue, offering an ordinance about it at their first council meeting Thursday.
Cougle made fixing the water system a central tenet of his campaign to unseat incumbent Mike Smith and won by a nearly 2-1 margin. He says he wants to work more collaboratively with President Mike Cooper’s administration to restore residents’ faith in the water system.
Corbin is a retired chemical engineer, who said he’s ready to be hands-on with parish Utility Director Chris Tissue to make sure the system works properly.
“I think the ordinance helps alert the community that David and I are aware of the issue and doing what we can that the system is going to be operated in a safe manner,” Corbin said.
Cougle said voters made it clear to him while he was campaigning that fixing the water system was their top issue.
“I had a woman tell me, ‘I would never have moved here to Cross Gates, if I had known that this was the situation.’ And I don't want that,” he said. “People should be able to live in their neighborhood and feel confident that their water systems are going to work OK, and it's not going to make them sick, their kids sick or their animals sick.”
The anger hit a crescendo after April 2021, when power failed at both of the Cross Gates system’s wells, a sewer line leaked within a few feet of a drinking water main and the state health department measured disinfectants in the line had dropped far below the minimum requirements.
But the parish utility department refused to issue a boil water advisory, and many residents along that water line reported gastrointestinal infections. Cooper defended the decision not to issue a boil advisory, contending water pressure in the line never dropped below the state standard of 20 psi.
The new ordinance proposed by Cougle and Corbin would only apply to Districts 9 and 13, where it would also require a boil water advisory if the disinfectants – measured by total residual chlorine or chloramine in the water -- ever dropped below a concentration of 0.5 milligrams per liter.
Current state law requires utilities to measure at least 0.5 mg/l of disinfectant to lift a boil water advisory after it’s been issued. But falling below that amount is not a trigger for issuing such an advisory in the first place.
Cougle said the new ordinance, if passed, would take the guessing game out of the process.
Cooper clashed repeatedly with the parish council about whether enough was being done to protect residents. He accused council members and residents of spreading misinformation about the safety of the water, and he refused to believe that documented illnesses and skin conditions were caused by the water.
An Owen & White engineering report in October 2021 recommended 35 improvements to the Cross Gates water system. The Cooper administration completed 12 of them and started on another five by March 2022. It promised to report on its progress online but hasn’t updated the report since then.
The parish started to implement one of the key recommendations, a chlorine burn to clean the whole system over a few months of 2022, but abruptly stopped the process about midway through.
Parish spokesman Michael Vinsanau didn’t answer how many of the 35 recommendations had been implemented at this point, but he did say that connecting the Cross Gates system to the neighboring Meadow Lake system would provide an important backup, and work on that connection is under way on Gause Boulevard. The parish is also planning to build two new water towers to maintain water pressure if power at the two Cross Gates wells were lost.
Turtle Creek resident Sherry Roberts said she’s happy that Cougle is hitting the ground running with the boil water advisory rule. But she wants to see more before she’ll consider drinking the parish water.
“A lot of stuff is going to have to change as far as … the wells being updated (and) being monitored correctly,” she said.