A number of DeKalb County commissioners on Sunday said they will take a critical look to see if the county responded quickly enough to a water main break that disrupted businesses and residences throughout the weekend.
Commissioners questioned whether enough was done to fix the problem and whether officials did enough to alert residents about it, such as issuing advisories that they needed to boil water before drinking it.
Commissioner Sharon Barnes Sutton said she will see if there are procedures in place to make sure the county is prepared if something like this happens again in the future.
“I don’t know if this could have been avoided,” she said. “I don’t know if the county responded appropriately. I have faith in our county employees so I believe they responded in the best way possible. But I will be asking questions about the response.”
Nancy Jester, who represents District 1 where the break occurred, said she sympathized with businesses that lost income because they had to shut down, and fretted over elderly residents who may not have known all that was happening.
“We need to take a hard look and figure out what set off the events that happened that made it take so long to fix the problem,” Jester said. “What could have been done to prevent this from spiralling out of control? Did we not have the right equipment? Did we wait too long to call in contractors who could fix it?”
Sometime in the future, someone else will run over another fire hydrant in DeKalb County, Jester said. “I want to make sure the county government has learned a lesson from this. Such as, could we have shortened the repair window?”
Jester also wondered whether county officials, perhaps thinking Thursday night’s water main break would be quickly repaired, waited too long before alerting the community about the problem.
“I do think the county was a little late in getting the word out to folks,” she said. “We need to make sure we have more robust communication in the future.”
Commissioners Jeff Rader and Stan Watson both said what happened over the weekend only reinforces the need for the ongoing $1.3 billion capital improvement program to upgrade the county’s water and sewer system. The county has estimated it will cost $280 million to replace old water lines.
“We have an aging water system with old structures that need to be repaired,” Watson said. “It shows this money is being well spent.”
Said Rader, “This will help improve the integrity of the system.”
The weekend’s events put county residents in a rare situation where they’d lost something they always took for granted, Rader said.
“One of the miracles of American life is that we don’t have to think about fresh, clean water until something like this happens,” he said. “We have a big system, so when there’s a problem like this it means big disruptions and a lot of inconvenience for everyone. The good news is that they’ve been able to repair it.”
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