Residents in previously unserved areas of Sampson County, North Carolina, will soon have access to municipal water, thanks to ongoing water line upgrades there. A new $13.3 million project, funded through American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and $250,000 in North Carolina state funds, will extend water service lines to the far southern portions of the county.
Dewberry is the project’s designer, working in close partnership with the North Carolina Department of Public Works and the North Carolina Division of Water Infrastructure. Kingston, North Carolina-based Herring Rivenbark Inc., is the project’s general contractor.
When ARPA funding became available in 2022, Dewberry supported Sampson County’s Board of Commissioners in developing a successful funding application for a water line improvement project in the area. The proposal drew heavily on earlier municipal water line feasibility studies that Dewberry teams conducted for the county roughly two decades ago.
“We had initially completed a study to get water to this area in the early 2000s,” said David Ross, a North Carolina-based Associate and Deputy Department Manager with Dewberry, who is serving as the Sampson County Municipal Water Improvement Project Manager.
“But upgrades were too costly and didn’t seem feasible at that time,” Ross explained. “When the ARPA funds became available, we were able to write a successful funding application quickly, because we’d already done so much of the pre-work 20 years ago.”
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Dewberry teams developed the design drawings for the project in August 2023 and received the contract to oversee the project in February 2025. Since then, Dewberry has worked in partnership with Herring Rivenbark crews to complete roughly 40 planned miles of new municipal water lines in Sampson County. Crews have generally run the new water pipelines within 10 to 12 feet of existing state highways and state roads to limit construction disruption in the area.
Once complete, the project will extend municipal water lines to residents who previously only had well water access. Broadly speaking, the project will extend water service lines from Ingold — where Sampson County’s municipal lines had previously ended — to Ivanhoe, a rural community with roughly 270 residents, located about 34 miles northwest of Wilmington in North Carolina.
“We’re about halfway through construction,” said Emma Ialeggio, a Dewberry Staff Engineer on the project. “Crews have already installed almost all of the water main extensions, and we are starting work on the construction of a central booster pump station.”
The $13 million budget — administered through the North Carolina Division of Water Infrastructure — included funding for the initial project survey and design as well as all aspects of construction and project administration. The entire project is on track for completion in summer 2026.
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Residents in rural Sampson County had long reported water quality problems with their well water. At public forums, many residents presented water samples from their homes that were cloudy and discolored. These visual cues suggested the region’s residential water could contain high levels of iron and other contaminants — likely due to corrosion from aging wells.
The high iron levels in the water made many residents feel unsafe drinking it or using it to wash their clothes, for fear of staining them.
“Most of the homes there either had their own well, or they were using a community well, with four to five homes on a single well,” Ross said. “They haven’t had the funds to drill new wells of higher quality.”
The southern portions of Sampson County are mostly low-lying and prone to flooding along the Black River. Residents there frequently faced unstable potable water supplies when hurricanes and flooding events knocked out their power lines, since most residential wells require electricity to operate. Additionally, flooding often caused groundwater contamination, especially in areas where wells had cracks, leaks, or other structural damage.
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Following Hurricane Florence in 2018, many homes in the area were without access to clean drinking water for several weeks.
Dewberry worked with Sampson County to hold public meetings, went door-to-door hanging flyers, and created social media and print public service messaging to inform residents about the option to connect their homes to the new, extended municipal water lines.
Homeowners who opted in faced no out-of-pocket costs, since all connection fees were covered by the project’s grant funding.
“The ARPA funding required us to connect the public water system to the private residents' existing plumbing,” Ross said. “A typical waterline project would only provide a service line to the meter. This one required us to extend the line from the meter to the residence.”
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The additional step of connecting directly to residents’ existing plumbing brought several added challenges to the project, including the need to gauge and fit piping to match each house’s unique plumbing. The project timeline also included the somewhat time-consuming but necessary process of securing permission waivers from homeowners to allow the contractors to work on residential premises.
Even with these challenges, work has progressed steadily, delivering sweeping new water access for the region.
“Historically, all of Sampson County's water system has been around Clinton [the county seat] and going north. Ingold [in the rough center of the county] was the first real expansion southward, and [this project adds] Ivanhoe from there,” Ross said. “In a matter of a relatively short timeframe, the county will now have water mains from its northern border with Johnston County all the way down to its southern border with Pender County.”
From an anticipated service area that included around 500 homes, roughly 200 homes have opted to join the new municipal water coverage area. Despite the public service messaging campaign, some residents decided to retain their individual wells or to stay on community wells.
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“You can do the work, but you’re never sure of how many people will sign up when the rubber meets the road,” Ross said.
In the future, residents can still opt to connect their home to the new municipal water line, but they will need to cover the cost of connection themselves, Ialeggio explained. Only those who joined onto the water line during this initial construction period will have those connection fees covered fully by the grant.
Ivanhoe is rural and very remote (roughly 20 miles separates it from the county seat of Clinton) so Dewberry had to design systems that could deliver proper water pressure and water quality even to homes far from staffed public works service offices.
The construction of a new booster pump station roughly a third of the way between Ingold and Ivanhoe will help ensure the municipal system retains adequate water pressure in Ivanhoe. The booster pump station will also support adequate water pressure for new branch lines extending west to serve residents near Garland, North Carolina, another rural community in the county.
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“[The booster pump station] was one of the alternatives we analyzed in the beginning stages of this project,” Ialeggio said. “We looked at several different alternatives, including additional elevated tanks or wells, but this was the most cost-effective way to convey water to all of the residential services in Ivanhoe.”
Dewberry integrated several other system features to facilitate the long service distance on the new municipal lines, including system loops, automated flushing valves, and automated meter reading, which will allow teams to remotely check water flow at centralized staffing stations.
In certain areas of the new line construction near Ivanhoe, small, short service lines flare out from the main line to meet the needs of a few homes, forming a series of “dead ends.” According to Ialeggio, each of those areas incorporates “automated flushers, so a staff member from Clinton doesn't have to drive an hour to the end of these to open up a hydrant to flush the line. All those flushing valves open up the line so that staff can release the water at the end of the system, remotely.”
County water department staff will also have the ability to adjust water flow as needed via Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) integration, using telemetry signals on dashboards at central offices.
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“If there is a significant decrease in water pressure, they can see that,” Ross said. “If there’s a significant demand spike on the line — a potential sign of a leak — they’ll see that. So, they’ll get a lot of situational awareness, remotely.”
To avoid potential flooding disruption to the new municipal water lines, Dewberry’s designs also called for directional drilling — non-vertical, slant drilling during the placement of underground pipes — when the lines crossed area streams or creeks.
This approach hopes to avoid water disruptions like those that occurred following Hurricane Matthew in 2016, when many water mains in the area were unearthed and left dysfunctional during flooding.
“These directional drills call for under-stream crossings that are at least 10 feet under the stream bed,” Ialeggio said. “The idea is, with these crossings in place, when future storm-based flooding events occur, there will be no impact to the water infrastructure.”
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Whenever possible, Dewberry’s designs called for Herring Rivenbark’s crews to match new pipe materials with those that Sampson County had previously been using along its municipal lines. The 40 miles of new lines were laid primarily using a mix of 4-inch, 6-inch, and 8-inch PVC pipes.
“We’re trying to make sure we’re matching what we already have in the system, as far as pipe material, so we don’t have to have multiple types of fittings to fix a leak or other issue that may happen,” Ross said.
Sampson County draws upon the Lower Cape Fear and Upper Cape Fear underground aquifers as its primary water sources. While the county had plenty of pre-existing water storage facilities, the reach to serve its southernmost residents had been challenging, prior to the availability of ARPA funding.
“For this project, expansion to serve more customers, providing a resilient water supply through a boost station, and equipping that booster station with a backup generator to keep water flowing during power outages were the key goals,” Ross said.
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In designing Sampson County’s new water lines, Dewberry has drawn expertise not only from their earlier feasibility studies in the county but also their extensive work on other water systems across the state.
“We’ve had a long-standing relationship with the state on water systems across North Carolina, including in Johnston County and other rural areas,” Ross said.
Ross anticipates that Ivanhoe and the other rural areas of Sampson County now receiving municipal water can expect to experience an economic development benefit, as well as the logistical and environmental benefits, once the project is complete.
“They can now tell people, ‘You can come to Ivanhoe [to live or bring your business]. We have clean, resilient water here,’” he said.
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- Owner: Sampson County/North Carolina Division of Water Infrastructure
- Designer: Dewberry, Fairfax, Virginia
- General Contractor: Herring Rivenbark Inc., Kinston, North Carolina
- Other Contractors: EFI-Solutions Inc., Centralia, Illinois (prefab booster pump station builder) Photos courtesy of Dewberry
