Atlanta takes control of broken water main that left parts of the city dry

ATLANTA (AP) — For at least some residents, Atlanta’s water problems weren’t over Monday.

Milena Franco, who lives in the Midtown neighborhood, said she and her husband had water all weekend. But on Monday morning, the flow went out, as Franco discovered while trying to take a shower.

“I went in the shower and just cried for a little while,” Franco said.

City officials said water was shut off in the immediate area as part of an effort to stop the flow of a broken water main that had been spilling a river into the streets since Friday evening.

The geyser finally dried up around sunrise Monday, after authorities trucked parts of Alabama under a police escort. But part of the city remained under orders to boil water before drinking it, even in areas where pressure had been restored after a first gigantic leak was repaired on Saturday. The area under the boil water order shrank significantly Monday afternoon, but the days of outages left some residents frustrated with the pace of repairs.

“We are focused on this problem and my administration understands how critical water is to our lifeline in this city,” Dickens told reporters at the site of the water main break Monday.

But his news conference ended before reporters could ask all their questions, as resident Rhett Scircle asked the questions residents in neighboring buildings wanted to know.

“When will the water be restored?” Is there an estimated timeline? We live here! Scircle yelled at Department of Watershed Management Commissioner Al Wiggins Jr.

Wiggins, who has been commissioner for less than a month, refused to estimate when the water would flow again, as backhoes dug a hole behind him. Authorities provided no estimate of how many residents were still affected or how many were affected at its peak.

Atlanta’s water outages are the latest setbacks as cities across the country scramble to 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.

Atlanta has spent billions in recent years to upgrade its aging sewer and water systems, including a tunnel cut through 5 miles of rock to store more than 30 days’ worth of water. Last month, voters approved maintaining a 1-cent sales tax to fund water and sewer work. The city historically dumped its untreated sewage into streams and the Chattahoochee River, until a federal court ordered it to stop.

Wiggins said Monday that “there’s still work going on” on the city’s water system. He later told city council members there would be a full inspection of the entire system.

The outage did not affect the entire city of 500,000: many areas in the north and south ends of Atlanta never lost water pressure and never faced an order boiling. But for tens of thousands of residents, the problems began Friday when a massive leak at the junction of three water mains caused a massive leak west of downtown. Wiggins said the leak was caused by corrosion and was difficult to repair because the three pipes created a confined workspace.

The Midtown escape began a few hours later. Wiggins said city workers still don’t know why it happened, but said it was difficult to repair because it happened at the junction of two large water lines and the valve allowing them to be closed was inaccessible due to the gushing liquid. The city instead dug holes in four directions a block away to cut off flow to the Midtown leak, although Scircle and some other residents said they saw little work for much of Saturday and Sunday.

Water pressure began to be restored early Sunday for many, and large events, such as a concert and an Atlanta United soccer match, were held in the downtown area on Sunday.

Some high-rise office buildings remained closed Monday, saying there was not enough water pressure to operate air conditioning units and supply water to upper floors.

Dickens, a first-term Democratic mayor, was in Memphis, Tennessee, on Friday to lead a political fundraiser for his 2025 re-election campaign and did not return until Saturday. Spokesman Michael Smith said Dickens also met with Memphis Mayor Paul Young and other leaders, that officials had not yet realized the severity of the problems when he left Friday and that Dickens was in “constant communication” with Atlanta officials.

Many residents criticized the city’s response, saying officials continued to fail to communicate clearly, even after Dickens apologized Saturday and promised updates every two hours.

José Franco, Milena Franco’s husband, said he and his wife continued to drink tap water for a while because they did not know the order to boil the water. He and his wife said the water outage in their apartment surprised them before dawn Monday.

“If they know there won’t be any water for a few days, they should provide more free water,” José Franco said. And he pointed out the “elephant in the room”: the inability to flush the toilet.

Marie Moore, who lives in a high-rise apartment building for seniors and people with disabilities, rode her walker to a Midtown fire station to pick up a case of bottled water. Firefighters were retrieving three more pallets of water from a truck, saying they were distributing the boxes quickly.

Moore, whose water became a trickle over the weekend, said the city needs to tap more federal money to improve infrastructure.

“It feels like everything is falling apart,” she said.

Dickens declared a state of emergency so the city could purchase materials and hire workers without following purchasing laws, but a spokesperson said there was no estimate yet of the cost from the emergency to the city.

Photo: A broken water line continued to gush through Monday. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

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