2018 Hurricane Season: RAPID: Rural residents' self-protections to perceived and actual contamination risk in private drinking wells after Hurricane Florence

Rural populations are among the most vulnerable to flooding events because they source drinking water from private and unregulated wells. Our ongoing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-funded work, in the center of Hurricane Florence's most-devastated region, presents this time-sensitive and unique opportunity. We will return to our study area's 336 private residences in Duplin and Sampson counties, North Carolina that installed and tested new wells in the months leading up to Hurricane Florence. We focus on these residents because they are particularly vulnerable to groundwater contamination, yet, approached Hurricane Florence with a common perception that their water source, given its recent testing, was low risk. This sample selection presents an opportunity to examine the perceived and actual impacts of an unexpected shock on groundwater contamination risk and the measures that rural homeowners took to self-protect. The urgency of the proposed work is to (i) test well water quality before the new contamination in the system clears, (ii) document the decay in contamination levels over time and (iii) examine whether homeowners' private efforts to buffer exposure corresponds with the decay in objective measures of exposure risk. Our ongoing EPA project has no current funding for this important extension.

Scholars @ ECU