Raleigh water tasting musty? Here’s why, and how long it will last.
It’s not just you. Raleigh’s water is tasting and smelling a little musty.
Social media and NextDoor listservs have lit up with questions about whether the city’s water tastes and smells a little off.
The good news is the earthy aroma and taste should be gone this week.
The water is safe to drink and use for cooking, cleaning and showering, according to a notice on the city of Raleigh’s website. It surpasses regulatory standards for safety and is properly disinfected, said Ed Buchan, Raleigh’s water resources manager.
“We really make every effort to produce the best water that we can,” he said. “And we apologize for this, hiccup, if you want to call it that. And we’re going to take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen moving forward.”
Buchan lives a few miles from the Falls Lake water plant, where the city gets about 80% of its water. His water tasted fine and he was caught off guard by the number of complaints that came in over the weekend. Raleigh also gets water from Lake Benson.
“I hear y’all are saying it’s safe but it is completely undrinkable,” said Katy Bauer on the city’s Facebook page. “I’ve never had this issue with our tap water, and I’ve been in Raleigh for nearly 20 years.”
Another Raleigh resident, Amy Mayhew, said she can’t ever remember the water “tasting like dirt” in her 25 years in Raleigh.
What’s causing the bad taste and smell?
The culprit is a change in algae and “algal activity” at Falls Lake. When algae breaks down it can change the taste and odor of the city’s water.
“There’s always going to be algae in lake water,” Buchan said. “That’s just a naturally occurring phenomenon. But in this case, it was an incredibly high level that we had not seen, to my knowledge, ever since we’ve been looking for these sorts of things. So this is an incredibly unique situation for us.”
The cause for the increased algae is unknown, he said, but it could be due to the hot and dry weather this past month.
Raleigh has added activated carbon and advanced oxidation by ozone to minimize the smell and taste but it will take a few days to purge the system. The city is updating its powder activated carbon system to address forever chemicals in drinking water, and that new system should also help with increased algae.
On its website, the city says some customers have improved the water’s taste and odor with a lemon wedge and that home filtration systems with fresh carbon can mitigate the taste.
The city provides water and sewer services to more than 600,000 residents, including in Raleigh, Garner, Knightdale, Rolesville, Wake Forest, Wendell and Zebulon. The city has more than 2,700 miles of water lines.
Raleigh’s water won first place in the 2023 North Carolina American Water Works Association competition and went on to place third in the “Best of the Best Water Taste Test” at the international conference.
