TALLULAH, La., and COTTON PLANT, Ark. — The water looked like coffee as it ran from the tap.
Even simple chores like laundry and dishwashing became nearly impossible, the water running like a medium roast brew from the faucet into the sink of Donald Wood’s home, staining clothes and appliances.
“I can’t recall the number of times I’ve driven to Vicksburg and rented a motel room just to take a shower,” Wood said, a drive of about 30 minutes each way. “Imagine bathing or showering or brushing your teeth in such filth.”
Wood is a longtime resident of the city of Tallulah. Nestled in Madison Parish, amongst expansive farm fields and venerable pecan groves, it’s known throughout the state for its decades-long struggle with poor quality drinking water.
“Several people here, when the water became so bad, so frequently, bought very expensive filters that they would put outside their house and to filter the yuck out of the water,” Wood said.
That includes his brother, who Wood said spent $8,000 on a filter. But even such an expensive device, besides costing more than many in Tallulah could afford, would still need to be regularly fixed because of such poor water quality.
“Every two or three days, you’d have to go outside, backwash the filter and start again,” he said.
Tallulah’s water highlights how severely poor drinking water can affect small towns. They face a variety of problems, from aging infrastructure to too few customers to support the needed upgrades. And help from state and federal governments, when it can be obtained, often comes with financial strings attached.
Nationwide, there are more than 45,000 community water systems serving 10,000 people or less. Altogether, these systems are supposed to provide clean water to more than 50 million people. For many of the 66 million Americans who live in rural places, they are the main source of water.
But according to the latest data from the Environmental Protection Agency, more than a third of those small water systems fell out of compliance with federal water standards sometime in the 12-month period that ended last September.
The problems included not meeting monitoring requirements, not notifying customers of problems and failing health tests. More than 3,000 districts were considered “enforcement priority districts,” meaning they had serious, unresolved or repeated violations.
The non-compliance rate was even higher in the area drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries.
To try to turn the system around in Tallulah, the state issued an emergency order in 2024 and put a private company in charge. The city council also voted to work with the state on a solution.
“We were having water outages several times a year” before the state took over, said Tallulah’s interim mayor, Yvonne Lewis, which initiated boil advisories across the system. “Literally, it was almost every other month. We had a couple of times where the water went out for a couple of days.”
The small city of Tallulah began shrinking in the 1980s, the charming, red-brick stores downtown succumbing to time and neglect as the population dwindled.
As a way to generate income for the city as the tax base disappeared, Tallulah bought its drinking water system from a private company. The water system became a main line of funding for the entire municipality.
“Sometimes that water revenue was floating the rest of the town,” said Lewis.
But, as pipes grew older, maintenance lagged and the city’s population — and paying utility customers — dwindled. Bills weren’t collected on time, or at all, said Lewis. The quality of the tap water suffered.
“Not very detailed maintenance, aging infrastructure, changes in personnel. … It really came to a point where the water system was just out of control,” she said. “It was just the ugliest time.”
A system drowns in debt
Two hundred miles north, the town of Cotton Plant, Ark., is dealing with water issues of its own. The town has been on a boil order since last year, with little hope of securing the funds needed to fix an aging water system that is drowning in debt.
Decades ago, Cotton Plant was a thriving agricultural town in the heart of some of the world’s most productive farmland in the Mississippi River Delta. The birthplace of musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the town was once an eastern Arkansas cultural hub with an opera house to boot.
The town’s population peaked at 1,800 in 1950 and has steadily declined to less than one third of that today. Like the rest of Woodruff County, Cotton Plant’s residents are older and poorer than the rest of Arkansas. The town has a median age of nearly 58 — almost two decades older than Arkansas as a whole — and a median household income less than one-fifth the state’s median.
Adam Chappell doesn’t remember Cotton Plant at its high point — but he at least remembers when the town had businesses downtown, a large farm community and water that wasn’t brown.
Now 46, he and his wife live just south of town. They farm about 2,400 acres of soybeans, rice and corn. He’s installed a litany of water filtration devices in his home already so that he and his family can have more consistent access to drinking water.
Still, he’s thinking about installing more so that he can take showers, wash dishes and do laundry without his belongings being stained by the brown water.
Chappell uses groundwater for his crops, so the boil orders haven’t affected his business. He, along with more than 200 other residents on the water system, pay their bill every month, but still aren’t sure whether the water is safe to drink unless they head to the town’s post office to see if there’s still a boil order on.
“I’m fixing to start hedging my bets against the water system,” Chappell said. “In the last eight to ten years, it has gotten bad, you know. Frequent boil orders and off-colored water.”
The town’s water struggles started in 2023 and worsened in 2025, after a break in one of the main water lines sent discolored water rushing through resident’s taps. Water samples taken in late April showed bacterial contamination. The next month, the Arkansas Department of Health placed the town on a boil order.
After the town paid $15,000 to repair the major break, the issue seemed to be solved in the short term, said Cotton Plant Mayor Clara Harston-Brown. However, the town hasn’t been able to send in water samples on schedule to get the boil order removed.
Harston-Brown is working on hiring a new full-time water operator, but it’s challenging to find someone qualified who is willing to work in a place like Cotton Plant.
She said Cotton Plant’s water system is far too large and costly to be managed by such a small town, so when issues arise with the aging infrastructure, there are few resources to throw at the problem.
When she took office in January 2019, the water department alone was over $700,000 in debt. Much of that was owed to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture and its federal counterpart, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for loans to upgrade and repair water infrastructure.
The town managed to pay off close to $300,000 in long-term water department debt by 2024 by transferring money from its already-strained city general fund. But in 2024, the department still had an operating loss of nearly $98,000 on revenues of just $147,000. On top of that there was a debt expense of nearly $20,000.
Harston-Brown said the pandemic also hurt the city’s finances, so in 2022, the town applied for another round of funding for the wastewater system, Cotton Plant’s first application for a grant or loan since 2010. Harston-Brown said the struggles with debt made it a difficult decision. The town’s application was denied.
“This is my last year in office, my eighth year, and I haven’t made a dent,” she said.
Now the town remains buried in debt, without a full-time certified water operator and no means to make more revenue without raising water rates. At the same time, residents remain without clear information on whether their drinking water is contaminated.
“We’ve got a fire station and a police station. … We’ve got six cop cars, so there’s obviously money for some things out there,” Chappell said. “So there’s got to be state funds for that. But not for water?”
As explained by local and national experts, the issues plaguing Cotton Plant are by no means unique. Just in Woodruff County, where Cotton Plant is located, there are nine water systems serving 10,000 people or less. Five of them are out of compliance with EPA standards.
A shift from grants to loans
Brookings Institution fellow Joseph Kane researches water infrastructure programs for the Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Kane said there are two main policy pillars that lend federal support to public drinking water systems across the country — the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act — which are implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Those two acts provide state governments with funds to administer loans to projects across the state, and in Arkansas, the Department of Agriculture and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission decides which water projects get funded across the state.
But ultimately, state and local governments are responsible for over 90% of the funding of water systems. And according to Kane, in the 1980s the EPA transitioned from offering grants to local water systems to providing them loans.
“So if utilities aren’t generating predictable revenue anyway, how are they going to pay back these loans? Right? They aren’t grants. How are they even going to access and apply for these loans in some cases? They may not even have the staff to put together an application, so just because the money is there doesn’t mean that it is accessible,” Kane said.
A year later, residents of Tallulah say that, while rates have increased, the state’s involvement has helped. The quality and consistency of the water is better.
“If you could have seen our water plant last year at this time versus this year, you would be amazed,” said Lewis, the interim mayor.
The city is hoping to keep control of the water system after making improvements with the state’s help. But earning back the trust of both residents and the state is something Lewis knows will be a challenge.
“I can say all day long, of course, I want to keep that water company, of course I want to keep that revenue stream, that utility under our control,” she said. “The most important thing is that my citizens are getting good water, however that happens.”
But improvements to the system have come at a cost. Fannie Augusta King, a Tallulah resident and community organizer pushing to improve Tallulah’s drinking water, says some people’s bills have nearly doubled.
“It's gone up I'd say about, at least, $80 to $100” a month, said King.
King says her parents' most recent monthly water bill was more than $200. Their water was clear and usable, but her aunt’s water, on the other side of town, still runs brown.
“Some areas are better than other areas,” said King. “We're trying very hard to get this fixed so that we can enjoy living in Tallulah. Not everybody wants to move to a big city. … The ability to keep fresh water is something we should be able to have.”
Even Lewis, the interim mayor, admits there’s still work to be done.
“Are we out of the woods? Absolutely not,” she said “Do we still have some discolored water? Absolutely.”
But some residents are not so sure they want Tallulah’s government back in charge. Wood wishes to see the private water company permanently take control of Tallulah’s water utility, and he’s willing to pay the difference if it means having usable water.
“I'm happy to pay more for my water utility to continue to get clear water that I can wash my clothing in,” he said. ”I don't think the city ever, ever needs to run it again.”
Ag & Water Desk data reporter Jared Whalen contributed.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.