Atlanta officials say water repairs complete after 5 days of outages and service restored

ATLANTA (AP) — Atlanta city officials said workers completed repairs to a broken water main Tuesday and that the city’s water problems were coming to an end after five days.

The city said Tuesday evening that workers installed new pipes after a leak that sent a gushing river through the streets of the Midtown neighborhood. Officials said water had been restored to a bar and hotel immediately adjacent to the leak and they were gradually increasing pressure in the system.

They predicted the pressure would return to normal by Wednesday morning, although the order to boil water before drinking remained in effect in Downtown, Midtown and areas to the east.

“Progress,” Mayor Andre Dickens told reporters at the site of the pipe rupture. “(I’m) so ready for this to be over. The people here too.

By Monday afternoon, the area subject to the boil water advisory had been greatly reduced after pressure was restored in many areas following the repair on Saturday of the first gigantic leak, west of the downtown.

Atlanta firefighters unload bottled water to distribute to residents at a fire station in the city’s Midtown neighborhood, Monday, June 3, 2024. The device was one of several used to shut off the flow of a leak which had gushed for more than two days in the Atlanta district. Midtown neighborhood. (AP Photo/Jeff Amy)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Jeff Amy

Water was shut off Tuesday only to the blocks immediately surrounding this repair site. But some hotels, offices and residences located in high-rise buildings in a wider area were still affected. Lower water pressure in the system means toilets will not work on upper floors and some air conditioning systems will not operate 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 first-term Democratic mayor, 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.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it was deploying personnel at Dickens’ request to conduct a thorough assessment of the city’s water system.

Col. Matthew McCulley, deputy commander of the South Atlantic Division, told WXIA-TV that engineers from the Corps’ districts in Savannah, Ga., and Mobile, Ala., will evaluate what help city officials need, in order to “examine this whole question”. infrastructure in Atlanta.

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 space for the work.

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.

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