Barbara Clark-Hooper is a long-time resident of the Dark Branch community in Brunswick County — a primarily Black neighborhood near Winnabow. She’s been there for 50 years, and her well water isn’t safe to drink.
“Sometimes it smells like boiled eggs, and it's rusty. And we have to always use stuff to try to, you know, keep the rust out," she said.
She says she relies on bottled water for drinking. Other neighbors use water softeners and filters to clean the water that goes through their pipes — some residents say their filters turn from white to a vibrant, rusty orange after just a month’s use, and have to be replaced.
That’s why the county’s NAACP has been organizing to ask the Brunswick officials to put these residents on county water. President Carl Parker got nearly 300 people to sign a petition demanding water and sewer hookups, and residents also went to a Brunswick County Commissioners meeting asking for help.
He spoke with WHQR while driving around rural Brunswick County, marking down roads that need water infrastructure. He said the NAACP is demanding water hookups "free of charge," especially since they’re seeing new developments cropping up near their homes, all with hookups to the county water system.
A Brunswick County spokesperson said staff have applied for grants for projects in some areas Parker has outlined. But the county faces a roadblock: it’s a Tier 3 County, meaning that even though it has pockets of poverty, it’s overall one of the least economically distressed counties in the state. And that’s a real disadvantage when applying for grants.
But Parker isn’t buying it. “The county is listed as a tier three and saying that they're too wealthy to get grants. But if they're that wealthy, then they need to share some of the wealth,” he said.
So, to help them seek water and sewer hookups for the Black communities in the unincorporated county, the NAACP hired a law firm out of Washington, D.C.: Earth Rights International. Attorney Maryum Jordan said they were brought on in 2022 after decades of advocacy from residents themselves.
"ln terms of water quality concerns for the well water, we believe that some of the contamination is due to Gen X that has been dumped in the Cape Fear River Basin. And these residents live right by the Cape Fear River and in terms of the foul odor and rust color, this is something that we've consistently heard for years," Jordan said.
Residents have been told they can pay to hook up to the water system. But system development and connection fees are at least $2,000 per household — and that’s if the water line is already running down that neighborhood’s street.
“These residents pay taxes to the county, and we think that this creates an obligation to provide basic needs and services to residents,” Jordan said.
Barbara’s neighbor in Dark Branch, Eugene Vaught, says he’s been working for a decade to get the county to hook him and his neighbors into the water system. Even though he uses water softener on his well water, his sinks and toilets are marked by orange rust stains.
“We was here before Boiling Springs ever developed. We was here before Mallory Creek and all those places developed and came in," Vaught said. "Now they're getting all the benefits of the water, sewer, and we pay taxes well, but we get no benefit at all from our tax money.”
So far, there haven’t been any lawsuits filed.
Responding to questions about this issue, Brunswick County noted the NAACP hasn’t yet provided a list of roads that need utility service, which would be key for crafting grant applications to help fund water and sewer line extensions.
The county has already applied for several grants that would cover some underserved areas: Longwood Road, Bolivia, and Navassa, for example. The county was even awarded an estimated $1 million grant from the EPA for the Bolivia water line project — but then the grant was removed from the federal budget. Another grant, $5.1 million from HUD for the Longwood Road waterline, was awaiting confirmation but has been scrapped. Similar water quality grants, including $20 million from the EPA to replace pipes and improve water quality, have become legal battlegrounds in Brunswick County, according to Port City Daily.
