A carnival of technology

One of the weirder aspects of citying up every piece of land in sight is the handling of water. Water is one of the services listed in Article IX, Section II, Paragraph III of the Georgia Constitution that a municipal corporation can (and in some cases must) provide, but water isn’t as suited to such hyperlocalization as things like police and fire protection (which I also think aren’t suited to it, but that’s a different argument). Water is a utility, and as such the pipes and whatnot are going to cross city or county lines in order to transport the water from the source to homes. But unlike power or natural gas, it’s a publicly owned utility, and Georgia puts the ownership at the local level. Some cities may set up their own water infrastructure or buy it from whoever was there before incorporation and then purchase water from some upstream provider, but the way things are handled in Fulton county is that the City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management takes care of all the water stuff and bills water consumers regardless of whether they’re inside the city limits or not. This probably really pisses off that lady who wrote the mayor after the Post Office crossed off “Sandy Springs” and wrote in “Atlanta” on one of her letters, but most people don’t care.

Atlanta has three 48-inch water mains coming into the city. I don’t know where the other two are, but I now know that one of them comes in from the north, presumably from Lake Lanier, and crosses Holcomb Bridge in Roswell somewhere close to 400. There’s construction going on in that area to build a new live-work-party community or something like that, and they constructed their way right into that giant pipe. This happened sometime on Thursday, and Friday was basically a continuous barrage of conflicting information as to just what the hell everyone is supposed to do about water.

Any time there’s a drop in water pressure past a certain level, a boil advisory is issued as a precaution against contaminants getting into the water supply, and it stays in effect at least 24 hours after pressure has been restored. My main sources of information on this water thing have been the Department of Watershed Management, who are slow to update their site, the Sandy Springs website, which provides about the same information in a slightly different form, local news outlets, which color the information with their own misunderstanding and speculation, and some signs around my apartment complex which I think were misinterpreted from Fox 5’s 12 o’clock news.

The first problem was figuring out whether I’m actually in the affected area. The primary chunk of land affected is between the ‘hooch and 285, in which I am not, but then a bonus area inside the perimeter was added. I’m in that, as this handy map from Sandy Springs shows:

So I’m in the affected area, and here’s where the advice gets a little weird. I’m supposed to “use water wisely,” but I’m also supposed to hoard it. One of the things suggested by the Atlanta water people was to fill a bathtub. I hope they don’t expect me to drink out of my tub. I don’t know if a Brita filter can remove the taste of the two powerful deodorants of Irish Spring, and I don’t care to find out. I did not fill my tub, but I did fill a few pots and Erlenmeyer flasks and whatever else was lying around. I then stuck them in the fridge, so I have enough cold, drinkable water to make it for a while.

I stuffed everything I could into the refrigerator door to make room for the pots, so I do have more in there just water and condiments, I promise. As for whether I actually need all that water, I don’t know. The pressure never dropped here, and I’m not entirely sure whether a boil advisory was issued or not. I think that the original plan was to begin repairing the main at 7pm last night, which includes digging down to it, with the advisory expected to kick in at 3am. My apartment complex told people that there would be no water between 7 and 3. The news told everyone to panic with some saying there’s a boil advisory already and some saying there’s not but it’s coming. The best I can make of the current state of all this information is that the main was repaired without the pressure dropping below the critical point, but they broke a valve when they turned everything back on, and there’s still a threat of water becoming messed up as they fix that. So nothing’s changed as far as the water, but I should expect the unexpected and probably not do any more loads of laundry in the meantime. Great.