Well pump repair in Lumberton

Call, and we will connect you with a licensed well contractor who covers Lumberton and the county around it.

First, are you actually on a well?

Worth settling before you spend a phone call, because in Lumberton it splits along the city line.

Inside the city limits you are almost certainly on City of Lumberton water, which serves around 25,700 people. If your water arrives with a monthly bill from the city, your problem is a plumbing problem or a city problem, and a well contractor is the wrong trade. Public Works is who you want.

Outside the city limits is where the wells are. That is most of the surrounding county, and it is who this page is for. Some of those addresses are on the Robeson County water system instead, so if you are not sure which you have, the quickest tell is whether there is a pump and pressure tank somewhere on the property, usually in a well house, a crawl space, a garage or a utility room.

Flooding, and why it matters more here than almost anywhere

Lumberton has been through two floods that were each supposed to happen once in a thousand years, two years apart. Matthew in October 2016 and Florence in September 2018.

The reason is a piece of local geography that anybody here can recite. Interstate 95 functions as a levee along the western edge of the city, and there was a gap in it where the CSX railway passes underneath. When the Lumber River came up, the water went through that underpass and into West Lumberton. Matthew alone damaged 2,367 structures and displaced around 1,500 people. West and south Lumberton were under mandatory evacuation again for Florence. A floodgate has since been built at that underpass.

For a well owner the consequence is specific. Floodwater that stands over a well head does not politely stay outside it, and what it carries here is not clean: overflowing septic systems, sewage from public utilities, and the contents of hog waste lagoons, 33 of which breached in this region during Florence. Researchers from UNC and Virginia Tech sampled 62 private wells in Robeson County afterwards and found total coliform in more than a quarter of them.

If your well was under water, or the yard around it was, it needs testing before anybody drinks from it. Contaminated well water usually looks and tastes completely normal, which is the entire problem. What to do if your well flooded sets out the steps and what the state advises.

What gets called in around here

• Pump failures. Taps gone dry, pressure falling away, air spitting from the taps, or a pump that runs and never shuts off.
• Short cycling. The pump clicking on and off every few seconds. Often the pressure tank rather than the pump, which is the cheaper repair, and worth diagnosing before anyone quotes for a pump.
• Water quality after high water. Cloudy, gritty or different-tasting water following a storm.
• New wells and abandonment. Both need a permit from county environmental health.

What any of it costs is on the cost page, including the part where being in the Coastal Plain makes a new well cheaper here than in most of the state.

Common questions

Do I need a permit to replace a well pump in Lumberton?

Replacing a pump on an existing well is a repair and does not generally require a construction permit. Constructing a new well does, and so does abandoning an old one properly, and those go through Robeson County environmental health rather than the city.

My water was fine after the last storm. Do I still need it tested?

Yes, if floodwater reached the well head or stood in the yard around it. Bacterial contamination is not visible and is not something you can taste, and after Florence roughly 15 percent of wells submitted for testing across the state came back positive for E. coli or fecal coliform.

How deep are wells around Lumberton?

This is Coastal Plain, so wells go into sand aquifers and are generally shallower and faster to drill than in the Piedmont or the mountains. Depth still varies house to house, and it is the single biggest factor in what a pump job costs, because everything scales with how much pipe has to come out of the ground.

Sources: City of Lumberton water system information; reporting on the Interstate 95 and CSX underpass levee gap during Hurricanes Matthew and Florence; UNC and Virginia Tech sampling of private wells in Robeson County after Florence; NC Division of Public Health post-Florence well testing results.