Water, Water Everywhere

Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.

(Updated.) When blown water mains in Atlanta blew up John Aba’s weekend plans, he wanted to look at the problem firsthand. Aba, 37, found himself on Joseph E. Boone Boulevard at Brawley, watching a dozen watershed workers in orange vests sitting around the remains of a 80-year-old clay pipe, waiting to get to work.

Aba, co-founder of Comedy Hype in Castleberry Hill, had been planning a new street festival called Castleberry Fest with other Black business owners for about two months, he said. “When did we find out about the alert? Yesterday around 5? While we were preparing, yo, the water’s not on, but no big deal, right? They’re going to fix it in a couple hours and we’re going to be back to moving.”

Jon was not back to moving.

“This morning, no water,” he said. “I said, you know what, I want to see what the eff is really going on with the crew, so I’m here right now on location, because I was trying to communicate with the other event organizers to see if something is going to take place. And right now I don’t see anything. The crew is sitting down and eating Burger King.”

Most of downtown Atlanta is without water this morning, and has been since 5 p.m. last night. West Peachtree Street is a flood at 11th Avenue, with one water main break. A second earlier break at Joseph E. Boone Boulevard and James P. Brawley Drive makes a relatively routine problem into a catastrophe. Other smaller breaks were reported at Atlantic Drive and Berkley Avenue.

Aba’s going to try to reschedule for Juneteenth, he said. But he’s frustrated, largely because a lack of communication from the city made adjustments that much more difficult.

Mayor Andre Dickens acknowledged that problem at a press conference this afternoon.

“Overnight, we did not do the best job of communicating,” he said. “For that I apologize.”

“We apologize profusely for this disruption to the life of the city of Atlanta. We will have regular updates,” he said, noting that the city has provided pallets of water for distribution from fire stations across the affected areas. The city also coordinated with the Gateway Center to drop pallets of water off for people experiencing homelessness downtown.

Dickens was at a fundraiser in Memphis yesterday afternoon as the city’s water infrastructure began failing. His absence was notable, given how regularly he communicates through social media and how he generally shows up to a crisis. He pledged that Watershed would have updates every two hours about the situation.

That’s a fundamental shift from the department’s initial strategy, which was to say nothing until they could report a change in conditions.

“I don’t want to give updates if I have nothing to add,” Scheree Rawles, a spokesperson for Atlanta’s Watershed Department, said earlier today.

Watershed management issued an alert Friday just before noon about the break on Boone, followed by a few quick updates. Just before 3 p.m., Watershed issued a boil water advisory and said that water would be shut off in the downtown and midtown areas at 5 p.m. to address the main break on Boone. The city noted two other smaller breaks, then made a second major announcement at about 9:45 when the second main pipe broke at West Peachtree and 11th.

This afternoon, the city extended the boil water advisory to basically everyone south of Ponce de Leon.

What Watershed has not said is when this will be over. And until this morning, they didn’t say what caused the breaks or whether those breaks were connected.

“I cannot give you a specific time. We don’t have any reason to believe that this will be anything other than a routine repair,” said Al Wiggins, Jr., Atlanta’s newly-minted watershed commissioner, at a 10 a.m. press conference Saturday morning. “But as you know, any water utility is a fragile setup. Because we are slowly pressurizing the system, we can’t give you a time. We are very hopeful that it is today.”

Wiggins moved over from running the city’s public works department to watershed about three weeks ago. He attributed the breaks to the city’s creaky system.

“There was a decay. The age of the pipe caused some decay and corrosion around a fitting,” Wiggins said. “When that particular fitting was removed, the crews also decided that there was unnecessary weight on that particular fitting, so they designed an alignment with that fitting that had less weight and more efficiency.”

The department spokesperson said that workers had to find the right valves at Hemphill to shut down. I initially took that to mean Hemphill Avenue, but I believe now that she was referring to the Hemphill water treatment plant. The correct valves are old, and aren’t on the system’s main switching system, she said.

Workers also had to find the street valves, which involve digging by hand through West Peachtree Street’s asphalt.

Wiggins declared that the Boone break had been repaired at that press conference.

Half an hour later, the department rescinded that statement and said it would take three more hours. Wiggins did not provide a timeline at the 2 p.m. update.

Pipes break in Atlanta all the time, he said. It took me an hour to find a copy of Watershed’s most recent annual report so I tell you how often those pipes break, to put this spectacular outage into some context … but the city’s watershed website is down and I couldn’t download the department’s annual reports.

In 2022, the city serviced 373 water main breaks. Plainly, none of those breaks required service to be shut off in wide swaths of the city for nearly a full day.

Restaurants are closed across midtown and downtown. City Hall is closed, the Georgia Aquarium is closed, the zoo is closed, water is off at public libraries in the city’s core, and Grady Hospital has canceled elective surgeries. To start. Marta stations in the middle of the city are closed. Megan Thee Stallion rescheduled her show last night.

Atlanta’s water system has about 2,790 linear miles of pipe, employs about 1,400 people, and serves about 100 million gallons of potable water to about 1.2 million people, including most of Fulton County. The department budget is about $650 million.

According to the annual report, the Department of Watershed Management has identified $8.7 billion in infrastructure investment needs. The department has a five-year, $1.6 billion capital improvement plan, funded in part from the MOST sales tax.

DeKalb is facing a federal consent decree and $4.4 billion in necessary repairs to its water and sewer systems.

Atlanta, like DeKalb, is digging out of a decades-old hole of deferred maintenance. Some of that can be attributed to urban disinvestment that started fifty years ago with white flight decimating the base of metropolitan water systems across the country. Atlanta only returned to the apex of its population a few years ago.

But some of this can be attributed to endemic corruption and mismanagement. Former City of Atlanta Commissioner of Watershed Management Jo Ann Macrina was sentenced last February to four and a half years in prison on federal charges for accepting bribes from an Atlanta contractor in exchange for steering city business worth millions of dollars to the contractor's company.

“So we are trying to upgrade,” Rawles said. “Some of these issues are from previous commissioners when work was not done. But I can't … we're not gonna bash the last three commissioners and say, ‘Well, you know, maybe they didn't do the work because …’ I don't know.”

Wiggins’ comments about being careful about repressurizing the system raises questions about whether the process of cutting off water after one break may have exacerbated problems in other areas, leading to a blowout. Rawles adamantly rejected that idea.

Chidi: Part of the reason I'm asking this question is because there is like, if they are connected …

Rawles: (Interrupting) Well, I don't want you to say that because, you keep saying that to me. And as I told you when you talked to me on the phone, what did I tell you? I said they're not connected! I have no reason to tell you they're connected.

Chidi: And I'm saying that because if they are unconnected then, and they happen like this, and the infrastructure is all more or less the same age, then one would presume that we're going to see more breaks like this …

Rawles: (Interrupting again) We see breaks every day …

Chidi: But I'm saying, of this …

Rawles: (Interrupting yet again) Not necessarily of this caliber. There could be. There may not be. Honestly, I can't predict what will happen underground. There are no cameras underground. … The only way we found out that there may be problems with this system is if we have a break.

I’m asking this question because failures are predictable, using past data and correlating that with the age of infrastructure, water use figures and other factors. Engineers are paid six-figure salaries to predict how often main breaks will occur, given a set of known conditions.

If the mains blew because the infrastructure is old, then we should be asking whether the end-of-life conditions are now going to lead to regular outages. As in, everything going all at once because it’s all worn out by the same amount.

If, however, shutting the valves to contain one outage created enough pressure on another part of the system to cascade into another main blown, or that repressurizing the system from one outage created another, then there are processes that can be used to mitigate failures.