Letter from the editor: A communication crisis at town hall as worrying as the breakdown of infrastructure

Let’s be frank: the city of Atlanta’s communication with the public during the water crisis has been an embarrassing disaster.

The lack of information and updates from Atlanta Watershed and the city itself stretched over six days and often forced other elected officials to turn to social media to fill in the gaps. communication. Warnings from the public and city council members did little to improve the situation, even after Mayor Andre Dickens and Watershed Commissioner Al Wiggins (who has only been on the job for a little over a month) have committed to doing so.

As a journalist for more than 35 years, being able to communicate a consistent message to readers has been my driving principle. When a crisis like the water main breaks out on May 31, we count on the city’s communications team, its experts and its elected officials to help us share this message with a worried, frustrated and struggling population. anger. We had reporters on the ground doing remarkable reporting from the ground, but the lack of response from the city made the coverage incomplete.

Friday May 31; Before noon

We first heard the sound of a water main break at 11:56 a.m. on Friday, May 31st. My colleague Beth McKibben sent a Slack message to the editorial team about restaurants using social media to report closing due to low water pressure. Shortly after, the city posted an “urgent notice” on social media regarding a water main break impacting water service throughout the city. It was the breakup of Vine City.

A cascade of closures ensued – restaurants, businesses, Atlanta City Hall, Fulton County government offices and major tourist attractions – as faucets ran dry and a boil water advisory was issued. went into effect for neighborhoods from West End to East Atlanta Village and from South Midtown to Center City.

Water was cut off to much of the city Friday at 5 p.m. This is also when timely updates from the city start to seriously falter.

Meanwhile, a second water main ruptured in Midtown, which would quickly worsen Atlanta’s water problems.

Where is the mayor?

Mayor Dickens remained silent Friday as the downward spiral began and was nowhere to be found — an oddity since he is usually communicative and quite present.

On Saturday, June 1, we learned that Dickens was in Memphis, Tennessee, for a campaign fundraising dinner. He was criticized for missing in action at the start of the crisis, but I don’t blame him. Politicians travel and raise money and he’s not a psychic so he couldn’t have known that.

However, a city spokesperson made this statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “When Mayor Dickens left Atlanta, the consensus was that the water main break was similar to the approximately 530 breaks or leaks that the city of Atlanta has experienced in recent years. 12 months. It was only late Friday evening, after repair attempts, that the City became aware of the seriousness of the damage.

The timeline of when Dickens learned that things had gone from a broken water pipe to something much bigger is still unclear.

Saturday June 1; 2:00 p.m.

A news conference at 2 p.m. Saturday was the first real communication about the citywide water outages from the mayor, who returned to Atlanta sometime after the fundraiser ended. The city had already been in crisis for more than 24 hours and he promised an update every two hours.

After the water was shut off at 5 p.m. the previous night, there had been deafening silence about repairs, a potential timeline for water restoration, and few to no details about what was happening at the water main break at 11th and West Peachtree in Midtown.

A geyser of water sometimes 18 feet high had been leaking from a hole in the ground next to the Eleventh Street Pub on 11th Street for hours. The force of the water ended up breaking the windows on Saturday afternoon and flooding the neighborhood institution. The water continued to flow unchecked until Monday June 3. Watershed crews were unable to find the shutoff valve – it turned out to be under the geyser – and were forced to install other cutoffs in locations near the main breach to stem the flow. flow of water.

An angry Megan Thee Stallion took to social media and criticized the city’s response after her two concerts at State Farm Arena were postponed. More seriously, Emory University Hospital in Midtown announced Saturday afternoon that it was diverting ambulances and moving patients due to the outage. And, to make matters worse, several small main breaks occurred around the city, notably on Euclid and North avenues.

The information that arrived from the city corresponded to that which arrived or did not arrive from the taps.

Sunday June 2

Although the Vine City break was corrected in a timely manner and the boil water advisory was lifted, the Midtown break proved much more difficult. Parts had to be sourced from Alabama and Gwinnett County, and a 100-year-old pipe segment had to be replaced.

One of the most glaring miscommunications occurred in the early hours of Sunday evening/Monday morning, when Atlanta Watershed announced at 12:30 a.m. that it was shutting off water to part of Midtown at 1 a.m. – and extended the boil water advisory. This post was posted while most of the city was sleeping and after many Atlanta restaurants and businesses were closed for an additional day and night, piling up financial losses.

The boil water notice for Midtown and East Atlanta would last two more days, and the maps ultimately released by Atlanta Watershed were confusing to the public.

Monday 3rd june

On Monday, Dickens and Wiggins made predictions about repair time coming and going without any follow-up or comment. When angry Midtown residents bombarded Dickens with questions about the timeline for repairs at a news conference Monday morning, he was evicted without answering any of them.

Later that afternoon, at the Atlanta City Council meeting, Dickens and Wiggins apologized for poor communication with the public and again promised to do better.

But more hours of silence followed and council member Liliana Bakhtiari eventually took to her own social media to provide an update and post a current boil advisory map. It was expected to start again Tuesday evening when the city failed to provide timely updates. Councilor Alex Wax was also sending emails to his constituents with updates.

Lessons learned?

By the time repairs were completed in Midtown and the boil water notice lifted for the city on Thursday, June 6, it had been six days since the city was in the grip of a crisis rivaled by Snowpocalypse 2014 and the I-85 bridge fire.

Dickens called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to assess the city’s aging water system and said he would create a “Blue Ribbon” panel and ask the federal government for the billions of dollars needed to repair it.

I sincerely hope that city officials learned a big lesson from this week-long miscommunication, but that remains to be seen.

While Dickens and his team said they were heeding the “wake-up call” about Atlanta’s aging infrastructure, perhaps another panel of experts should be established on how to communicate effectively engage with the public during a crisis. Put people on the payroll who know how to make it happen.

Repairing aging infrastructure has been a task launched by successive administrations for decades. Only Mayor Shirley Franklin made a dent when she repaired the city’s crumbling sewer system, which was a hallmark of her tenure.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was a frequent voice on social media and television keeping Atlantans informed about situations directly affecting the city. My inbox was usually filled with updates from different city departments.

But it is clear, after last week, that there has been a communications breakdown at City Hall that Mayor Dickens needs to address immediately. This repair is just as important as the pipes.