Atlanta water system still under repair on fifth day of outages

“We’re making progress,” Mayor Andre Dickens told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the site of the burst pipe in Midtown. “(I’m) so ready for this to be over. The people here too.

By Monday afternoon, the area under a boil water advisory had been sharply reduced after pressure was restored in many areas following the repair of the first gigantic leak on Saturday, west of the center -city. But Downtown, Midtown and areas to the east remained under a boil order Tuesday, and water was still off in the blocks immediately surrounding that repair site.

Workers continued cutting and installing new pipes Tuesday after a leak that sent a gushing river through Midtown streets was finally cut off around sunrise Monday.

Some hotels, offices and residences in high-rise buildings in a wider area were still affected Tuesday, as lower water pressure in the system means toilets do not work on upper floors and some air conditioning systems do not function normally.

Norfolk Southern Corp. has partially closed its headquarters about eight blocks from the repair site. Georgia State’s downtown office complex still faced low pressure and discolored water, but Gerald Pilgrim, deputy executive director of the Georgia Building Authority, said “all systems are operating at safe levels”.

“We know there are mixed results here in terms of buildings and experience with water service and water pressure,” said Brian Carr, a spokesman for Midtown Alliance, which promotes development in the district of Atlanta.

Many residents are frustrated with the pace of repairs. Officials have not provided any estimates of how many residents are still affected or how many people will be affected at the peak.

“I’ve never seen a situation like this in my entire life,” Midtown resident Chris Williams said Tuesday. “It’s a pretty big city and it kind of gives it a small-town feel. … Why couldn’t we have discovered this sooner and how could we not inform more about it?”

Dickens, a Democratic mayor for his first term, was criticized for his absence from the city and his slow communication after the first leak began. Dickens left Friday and spent the night in Memphis, Tennessee, to raise money for his 2025 re-election campaign. He said the extent of the problems was unclear when he left.

Spokesman Michael Smith said Dickens met with Memphis Mayor Paul Young and other leaders, and was in “constant communication” with Atlanta officials before returning Saturday.

Atlanta’s water outages are the latest setbacks as cities across the country shore up their failing infrastructure. A 2022 crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, whose water system has long struggled, left many residents without running water for weeks. Other cities, including Flint, Michigan, have also struggled to provide their residents with clean drinking water.

Atlanta voters support the improvements: Last month, they approved maintaining a 1-cent sales tax to fund water and sewer improvements. The city that dumped untreated sewage into streams and the Chattahoochee River until a federal court ordered it to stop has spent billions to upgrade its aging sewer and water systems, even digging a tunnel through 8 kilometers of rock to store more than 30 days of water.

The latest unrest began on Friday when a junction of three water pipes caused a massive leak west of the city center. Department of Watershed Management Commissioner Al Wiggins Jr. said the leak was caused by corrosion and was difficult to repair because the three pipes created a confined workspace.

Wiggins said city workers still don’t know why the Midtown leak started a few hours later, but it was also difficult to repair because it occurred at the junction of two large water pipes and the valve allowing them to be closed was inaccessible under the gushing liquid.