Western Louisiana church to build water filling station in city with failing municipal system

[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Laurent De Prins, rector of Epiphany Opelousas in the Diocese of Western Louisiana, had just finished speaking by phone with Episcopal News Service about the clean water crisis affecting his community when he received an alert underscoring just how severe that crisis has become.

De Prins and other Opelousas residents have become accustomed to frequent boil water advisories. Minutes after his Sept. 22 interview with ENS, he spotted a notice on social media that the city again was advising residents to boil their water before drinking or cooking with it.

“Thanks for your patience and cooperation,” the city’s advisory said.

Even after the city lifts its boil water advisory, many residents still consider the municipal water undrinkable, De Prins said. For years, Opelousas’ tap water – ranging from yellow to brown – has been found to be filled with contaminants  and “may pose a health risk over an extended period of time,” according to a 2023 state report. Many residents opt out of the dilapidated water system entirely by buying bottled water or filling larger jugs for a fee at consumer filling stations, while city officials pursue a costly long-term fix for the failing infrastructure.

Any permanent municipal solution is still years away, so the Epiphany congregation decided to help with a temporary remedy. With a $82,000 grant awarded this year by The Episcopal Church’s United Thank Offering, the congregation plans to purchase and install a water filtration and filling station on church grounds. Once installed, residents will be able to fill up on clean, safe water – free of charge.

The congregation initially considered buying individual water filters to distribute to residents but concluded that option was not financially feasible, De Prints said. “Doing one centralized water filling station made the most sense.”

The church is centrally located in Opelousas, and the congregation envisions building a kind of shed to house the filling station, with two vending windows to accommodate residents who bring their own jugs. The system would use reverse osmosis technology to remove any impurities in the city water and an additional layer of UV filtration to kill bacteria.

De Prin is hopeful that the filling station will be up and running by spring 2026. The congregation has been supportive of the project as a way to follow the Christian call “to meet the needs of our neighbor to love our neighbors as ourselves,” he said.

The church also will benefit. Its own drinking water often comes out of the tap looking dingy and unappetizing, De Prin said.

Opelousas is a city of 15,000 people about a half hour north of Lafayette and an hour west of the state capital, Baton Rouge. Census records show 34% of residents live below the poverty level, a rate nearly twice as high as the statewide poverty average and nearly three times the national average.

That means many city residents may struggle to afford bottled water after still being expected to pay their municipal water bills in support of an unreliable, potentially hazardous public system, De Prin said.

For years, studies have shown that public system to be deficient, a fact residents could see with their own eyes. “The water is brown everywhere,” Kyedric Parker told KLFY-TV in 2022. “We don’t want to be bathing or drinking or cooking with this water. We need it fixed now.”

At that time, city officials blamed a water main break for the brown water. “It is something we address immediately and as fast as we can possibly get somebody on-site at that time,” Mayor Julius Alsandor told KLFY.

But the ongoing scope of the problem is extensive and has not improved. In 2023, a teenage Opelousas resident, Nyla Belton, told the news website Capital B that the poor water quality was contributing to a local environment where she fears for her health and safety.

“It makes me feel unsafe and unsanitary and that everything is dirty,” Belton said. “The water companies and the government don’t really care.”

In 2024, when a city engineer presented the state’s latest analysis of the water system to the Opelousas City Council, the outlook was bleak.

“Every well has some issues that need to be addressed,” engineer William Jarrell told city leaders. “Your water treatment facility has to be upgraded or rehabilitated. Your distribution system has excessive number of leaks and your storage facilities, all of them need work. So pretty much everything in your system.”

The city has sought outside funding to assist in its pending overhaul of the entire water and sewer system, a fix that is expected to take years to complete.

“There’s just a huge plethora of water issues,” De Prin told ENS. In the meantime, his congregation is working with engineers and contractors to get its water filling station installed and running.

Epiphany’s was one of 27 projects included in a more than $1 million award in June from the United Thank Offering. This round of UTO grants was focused on projects providing water access, sanitation and education.

Most of Epiphany’s grant will be spent on installing the filling station. The design is still being finalized, and De Prin would welcome a design that would allow the church to move the filling station to another community in need, once Opelousas’ public water crisis ends. Until then, the church will also need to pay for the water distributed from its filling station. Epiphany will accept donations but will not charge anyone to fill up their water jugs, De Prin said.

“If we can keep construction costs down to what we had budgeted or less, that provide us more funding [from the UTO grant] to offset the cost of the water,” he added.

De Prin doesn’t know how many people will take advantage of the filling station or what the usage costs will be for the church, but the congregation is eager to get it up and running.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.