Tainted, brown drinking water grips a Southern Oregon town

Janel Harlan remembers drinking water from the hose as a child in Lakeview. Back then, the water looked clean, something she rarely thought about.

But when Harlan returned to her Southern Oregon hometown as an adult, she was stunned by what she saw coming out of her faucet.

“It was like dark, sludgy Coca Cola,” Harlan said. “It was disgusting.”

For Lakeview’s 2,500 residents, this smelly brown drinking water has become the norm — at least, for now. Many avoid wearing white clothes, because they get stained in the washing machine. Some residents reported using baby wipes to bathe instead of showering. When the water gets particularly brown, the town’s lone grocery store runs low on bottled water.

Other people have gallons of spring water shipped to them, or pay for expensive home filtration systems.

Lakeview’s leaders are sounding the alarm, hoping state and federal lawmakers can step in to provide the tens of millions of dollars needed to fix the crisis. But, that kind of funding is unlikely, as Oregon grapples with billions of dollars’ worth of backlogged water infrastructure projects statewide.