Athens Doesn’t Face Same Water Problems as Atlanta, Officials Say

In May, multiple water mains in downtown and Midtown Atlanta burst simultaneously, forcing businesses to close, residents to boil water for nearly a week, and Megan Thee Stallion to cancel a concert until city workers made repairs. But Athens-Clarke County officials say they are confident a disaster of this magnitude is unlikely to happen here.

“ACC Public Utilities Department (PUD) staff goes above and beyond the call of duty to make sure the water is clean, the fire protection is there, all of that,” said PUD Director Hollis Terry.

Atlanta officials have attributed the major breaks to aging infrastructure: Some of the downtown pipes are 100 years old. In Athens, all of the old cast-iron pipes downtown dating back to 1893 have been replaced as part of various urban development projects, such as the recent overhaul of the Clayton Street infrastructure, according to ACC Department of Public Utilities officials.

The ACC is also replacing aging pipes elsewhere in the county and adding new ones. Every five years, the PUD updates its 20-year service delivery plan. In 2020, the most recent update, Athens had just over 800 miles of water mains. About 100 miles have been added in the last four years. The 2020 service delivery plan calls for spending $400 million on water and sewer infrastructure, including $20 million to upgrade aging water mains.

“It’s everywhere (in the county), and a lot of times it has to do with age,” Terry said.

“We can replace a broken pipe every three months,” adds assistant manager Hugh Ogle. “It depends on the maintenance history.”

But overall, even the old cast iron pipes “were in pretty good shape for what they are,” Ogle said. Those old pipes tend to get brittle over time. The city now uses ductile iron pipes for water lines.

In addition to replacing aging pipes, many of which are now too narrow and fragile, PUD is continually expanding the water network to create multiple routes for water to reach customers. This way, water remains available even if a main breaks. “We have so much redundancy that a complete outage is unlikely to occur,” Terry says.

Boil water advisories are rare in Athens. But when a water main breaks, customers sometimes see discolored water flowing from faucets. Minerals in water build up in pipes over time, and when the pressure drops, they get stirred up, Ogle says. But the minerals aren’t harmful, he says.

With 200 employees and a nearly $60 million operating and capital budget for 2025, the PUD is one of the largest departments in the ACC government. The department is funded primarily by taxpayers and does not receive property tax revenue, but it does receive sales tax funding for some capital projects. Those costs, however, pale in comparison to the billions of dollars in repairs to Atlanta’s water system, according to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Dickens is not the first mayor to seek federal help to tackle long-overdue water infrastructure projects. Jackson, Mississippi’s water system nearly collapsed in 2022 after decades of neglect and disinvestment due to white flight and a shrinking tax base. A torrential rain made water from the Ross Barnett Reservoir harder to treat, and the resulting slowdown at the city’s two aging treatment plants left many of the city’s 150,000 residents with dangerously low water pressure.

The crisis in Flint, Michigan, was even worse. In a city with a decimated tax base, such as Jackson, a gubernatorial emergency manager stopped buying water from nearby Detroit’s Lake Huron and began drawing it from the polluted Flint River to save money. The water caused a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak and corroded lead pipes, exposing thousands of children to dangerously high levels of lead.

“It would be impossible to compare us to Flint,” Ogle says. For one thing, Athens’ raw water sources — the North Oconee River, the Middle Oconee River, Bear Creek Reservoir in Jackson County and, over the next decade, a rock quarry in East Athens that the county purchased in 2020 — are much cleaner. For another, the PUD has conducted a survey looking for lead water lines and found none, though it’s possible that some buildings have lead lines on private property, because the PUD’s responsibilities stop at the edge of the right-of-way.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires utilities to test water frequently and issue a water quality report each year. The most recent report, from 2023, found that Athens’ drinking water met all federal standards.

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