Story highlights State health officials are testing the water in St. Joseph for lead over the next 30 days

Residents have been advised not to drink the water or use it for food preparation

(CNN) Each week for months, Janet Thornton has spent $20 to buy drinking water for her husband and herself.

"We don't have a lot of money," she said, "so we just boil the water on the stove for our dogs. No one has told us if that's OK."

This past spring, the town of St. Joseph was dealing with "not aesthetically pleasing" brown water running through residents' faucets. State health officials said then it was not dangerous.

Now, a few months later, water in this Louisiana town of about 1,000 shows high amounts of lead in some samples, and it may be dangerous.

On December 16, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a public health emergency in the town after two of 13 site samples the day before showed elevated levels of lead, which was absent from water samples at the start of the year.

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