A small, rural town in southeast Kansas has been virtually shut down after discovering worms in their water supply system.
Residents of Marthaville, Kansas, a small unincorporated town, 18 miles southeast of Independence, are being ordered not to drink tap water, after tiny red blood worms started appearing in water glasses and filtration systems in the rural town earlier this week.
The outbreak in Marthaville, KS, has all but shut down the mostly Amish community, home to around 400 people. Schools are closed, convenience stores can't serve fountain sodas, and residents have been instructed not to cook or brush their teeth using tap water. Bathing, fortunately, is still deemed acceptable by local health authorities.
Blood worms — actually the larvae of the midge fly — are typically small, ranging between half-an-inch to one inch in length. They're known to thrive in the southeastern United States, though not often in municipal water supplies, however, a similar outbreak has been reported recently in Colcord, Oklahoma, 75 miles east of Tulsa.
Commonly sold freeze-dried as fish food, blood worms tend to thrive in low-oxygen or heavily polluted water, where they burrow inside mud. And unfortunately for officials in Marthaville, the louts are also extremely resilient. "The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach can't even kill them," Debra Maggard, the town's water maintenance supervisor, told a local news network. "You can take the worms out of the filter system and put them in a straight cup of bleach and leave them in there for several hours, and they still won't die."
It is currently unknown as to how the worms are entering into the supply system. "We basically get our water from the same source as Coffeyville, and they haven't reported any problems. But that's probably because most of their residents utilize water filtration screens on their kitchen taps and just haven't discovered them yet," said Maggard.
The health risks associated with ingesting blood worms are unknown, though they aren't believed to cause adverse effects. But local authorities in Marthaville aren't taking any chances — while they try to figure out how the worms infiltrated water supplies in the first place, they're also distributing pallets of bottled water to residents.
Residents of Marthaville, Kansas, a small unincorporated town, 18 miles southeast of Independence, are being ordered not to drink tap water, after tiny red blood worms started appearing in water glasses and filtration systems in the rural town earlier this week.
The outbreak in Marthaville, KS, has all but shut down the mostly Amish community, home to around 400 people. Schools are closed, convenience stores can't serve fountain sodas, and residents have been instructed not to cook or brush their teeth using tap water. Bathing, fortunately, is still deemed acceptable by local health authorities.
Blood worms — actually the larvae of the midge fly — are typically small, ranging between half-an-inch to one inch in length. They're known to thrive in the southeastern United States, though not often in municipal water supplies, however, a similar outbreak has been reported recently in Colcord, Oklahoma, 75 miles east of Tulsa.
Commonly sold freeze-dried as fish food, blood worms tend to thrive in low-oxygen or heavily polluted water, where they burrow inside mud. And unfortunately for officials in Marthaville, the louts are also extremely resilient. "The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach can't even kill them," Debra Maggard, the town's water maintenance supervisor, told a local news network. "You can take the worms out of the filter system and put them in a straight cup of bleach and leave them in there for several hours, and they still won't die."
It is currently unknown as to how the worms are entering into the supply system. "We basically get our water from the same source as Coffeyville, and they haven't reported any problems. But that's probably because most of their residents utilize water filtration screens on their kitchen taps and just haven't discovered them yet," said Maggard.
The health risks associated with ingesting blood worms are unknown, though they aren't believed to cause adverse effects. But local authorities in Marthaville aren't taking any chances — while they try to figure out how the worms infiltrated water supplies in the first place, they're also distributing pallets of bottled water to residents.