Water lines break, City Hall’s communications fail, the public’s questions go unanswered and locals are left wondering if the water’s safe to drink
Above: documents from a press packet handed out by city officials this afternoon, depicting a somewhat sunnier picture (and clearer water) than many locals were experiencing
Late Sunday, a city water crew was repairing a large line on Lyman Street, running right between the River Arts District and Southside, completed their work. But during the coming hours, an “equipment failure,” in the words of a later city report, caused the line to break.
Locals throughout “a large area” (city staff claim they still don’t know the full extent) suddenly lost water. The city issued a boil water advisory (meaning anyone impacted should boil theirs for a minute or more) but their messaging was unclear and many locals directly impacted weren’t notified. This came while many in and around Asheville were still dealing with discolored water from another break less than a week before, something that officials now claim won’t completely clear up until Friday. That break happened during the course of a repair on a line nearer the city’s reservoir, sending sediment throughout the system.
As of a press briefing this afternoon, city officials claim that except for Lyman Street and part of the area around Warren Wilson College, the boil water advisory has been lifted. They tell the public that the water, (including the discolored stuff), has always tested safe to drink, but many (somewhat understandably) refused to do so. Some, on social media and elsewhere, claimed that drinking some of the discolored water had upset their stomachs. This afternoon, Assistant city manager Cathy Ball admitted the city itself had received one report of illness that a resident claimed was related to drinking the discolored water. She reassured the public they were following up on the matter.
At the briefing, City manager Debra Campbell said she shared the public’s frustration, admitting that “we should have done a better job” notifying residents. Water director David Melton claimed that new communications guidelines would ensure such a situation wouldn’t happen again, and that they’d adjust water bills to make up for locals having to flush the sediment out of their lines from the earlier break. There were, as the city’s communications head Dawa Hitch put it, “lessons to learn.”
That’s an understatement. The scope of the city’s communications failure is significant, and it raises a lot more questions than it answers. Over a day later, many of those hit by the line break — including some directly signed up for the city’s official alert service — still hadn’t received any notification. Other locals (5,000 by the city’s own estimate) are still dealing with discolored water. The two breaks have delayed school, temporarily shuttered or hurt businesses and left Ashevillians and many others wondering if their water is safe.
The breaks
The city’s water system serves about 100,000 customers both inside and outside Asheville. Some residents along Lyman Street had already been told in advance that they were under a boil water advisory due to Sunday’s line repair work. Those households were apparently notified Monday morning, following the latest break, that the advisory was still in effect.
At 8:37 a.m. city communications staffer Christy Edwards issued an announcement:
Contract work in the River Arts District on Lyman Street has caused a blow-out in a water line that has created low pressure or no water service to a large area.
The blow-out happened early Monday morning but has been found and isolated.
The City hopes to have service restored on Monday morning.
For customers who had no water during the outage, they will need to follow a Boil Water Advisory. Those customers are being contacted by the Water Department via AVL Alert.
AVL Alert is the city’s official notification system, capable of notifying both water customers hit by a break and those who have signed up for it (many renters don’t pay their water bills directly to the city). But those customers were not, in fact, contacted by AVL Alert.
I called the city’s water services around mid-day Monday, asking which areas were impacted. I was told by the water staffer that only people along Lyman Street should be concerned.
As it turned out, that wasn’t the case, and it even seemed to run contradictory to the “large area” announcement made earlier that day. It also turns out that the vast majority of those impacted by the water line break were never notified by AVL Alerts — or any other means — that they should, as a precaution, boil their water.
At 4:10 p.m., this announcement arrived from city communications staffer Ashley Traynum-Carson:
This morning some residents awoke to little or no water. We apologize for the inconvenience. We always listen, and what we have heard is that the information we provided in regards to who needs to boil their water remains unclear.
There is no evidence of contamination in our water system. As a precaution, we are advising people to boil their water if they experienced a complete loss of water Monday morning. The City will let customers know when the advisory has been lifted via local media channels.
I spoke with Hitch less than an hour later. She claimed the city didn’t know how many people in which areas were impacted by the break. Due to local topography, she said, people at one end of a street could be fine while their uphill neighbors should be a lot more wary. The city’s late afternoon announcement claimed they “learned this morning that some customers further away from the site also suffered a complete loss of water due to fluctuating water pressure. As a precaution, those customers are also being advised to boil water.”
But if they were advised, many never found out. Monday night I had already heard from residents, especially in West Asheville, that they’d received no notification at all. Multiple residents at the Meadows, a large, mostly working-class apartment complex in West Asheville, told me their water was out that morning but they’d received no caution that they should boil it.
Resident Aaron Reilly told the Blade he was alarmed by both this and the discolored water that hadn’t let up, that his neighbors were unaware of the boil water advisory and that the website for the city’s water department was “completely useless.”
Indeed, that website has no notification about the boil advisories at the top of the page (though the city has them in its “Latest News” section on its main web page). Heading the water department’s announcements section is a proclamation marking March 22 as World Water Day.
At first, it looked like this might be a major problem with the city’s emphasis on notifying water system customers. Over half of Ashevillians are renters, and many of us don’t pay our water bill directly to the city, but to our landlords (or as part of our rent). This morning, however, after I posted updated information on the issue, it emerged that the city’s communications failure went far beyond that.
“We own, and had no water, and were not notified,” resident Kate Fisher asserted. “I think the lack of communication is uniform in this instance. I also think they just don’t really know.”
According to West Asheville resident Carrie Plaxco “I had no water Monday morning…I had NO idea I was under a boil advisory and I am signed up for notifications from the city!”
“I’ve received many boil water and other such texts in the past. This time I’ve only gotten one text on 3/27 which said it’s discolored but safe and aesthetic and will last until the end of the week. My water is still brown today, the following week, and no updated information,” Ashley Cooper wrote in a Facebook post. “Communication has definitely been lacking in this situation. My thoughts go out to all the humans that, I’m sure, have been scrambling in their roles to address this situation. And, it’s a good learning for us that our communication systems for informing people are not currently working well. ”
After I left the city briefing, another local long signed up for AVL Alerts told me they still hadn’t received any notification about the situation, even one that the boil water advisory was lifted.
Asked about the notification issues at the briefing, Hitch claimed that the line that broke Monday was fairly large, and the extent of the break and the number of people who lost water service surprised them.
“That’s where we think the communication got confusing. Moving forward, if you have no water consider yourself under a boil water advisory” until informed otherwise, she said.
Hitch admitted that “we need to start using our alert system for a larger area.” In remarks after, she and Edwards clarified that multiple officials in different city departments had authority to issue an AVL Alert.
“There were numerous things that happened simultaneously,” Campbell said at the briefing. “We should have done a better job.”
Multi-level failure
That’s putting it mildly. The entire incident, and the city’s response, raises some pretty serious concerns.
First is the state of the city’s system itself. Asheville’s generally had a good reputation for water quality, and the city’s invested in improvements to the aging water lines since it took control of the system in 2005. While our city’s nigh-ancient infrastructure is a major problem across the board, until recently water seemed an exception.
But this many incidents in this short a period raise some real problems. Does more need to be done? Does the water department need more staff? Better equipment? The city’s about to enter a big debate over its annual budget. Perhaps policing (the department has received a slew of major, controversial increases) and raises for senior city staff (where focus for the budget controversially went last year) could use some cuts to direct more resources to the water system.
The communications breakdown, however, is where the events of the past few days are really disturbing. People not knowing that they might need to boil their water is kind of a major problem.
Given the city’s experience in running a water system, the fact that a large line break like the one that happened Monday would impact a larger number of people than just a single street seems like the thing that they should have known and widely communicated.
Indeed, the city’s announcement Monday morning showed that they already had some awareness that “a large area” was impacted by the break. An alert at that point with basic information about the boil water advisory could have been a big help. None happened, and thousands of people continued about their days unaware of a potential health issue. Also, at least based on the call I had with water services, the scope of the problem wasn’t communicated even to members of the public directly calling the city hours later.
The fact that the ability to send out AVL Alerts is distributed throughout city departments makes this failure even more baffling, especially as the hours wore on and Monday turned into Tuesday. By that point the city had no excuse: they knew the break had impacted thousands, and they even admitted — as Hitch’s comments yesterday showed — that they still didn’t know the full extent.
The fact no one, among the array of city officials with the ability to do so, issued a broad alert through the system they set up for that very purpose goes far beyond a simple mistake. It’s incompetence.
Without water, lives break and cities die. Perhaps this time the water was fine, and the advisory was just an extra step. But failing in the basic task of informing the public about such a core matter shouldn’t be anything anyone should forgive or forget. Today it was a precaution, tomorrow it could be a catastrophe.
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