Officials in Atlanta think that the city’s water service will be back to normal on Wednesday morning. A series of burst water mains left big parts of the city without safe drinking water and put the city in a state of emergency.
After work is done on fixing a broken water main at 11th and West Peachtree streets in Midtown, full water service should be back on between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., the city said in a news release Tuesday.
People in some parts of the city, from downtown to Midtown and into a few East Atlanta areas, were still told to boil their water Tuesday night.
On Friday, the first two of a series of water main breaks appeared along two lines that were about a hundred years old. One was a 36-inch pipe and the other was a 48-inch pipe, according to Mayor Andre Dickens. The mayor said that one of the lines that broke was put in place in 1910 and the other in 1930.
On Saturday, Dickens declared an emergency because of a series of breaks that left parts of the city without water or with boil water warnings. These problems made it hard for medical and educational facilities in the city to work.
Emory University Hospital Midtown started sending ambulances away from its emergency room and dialysis patients to other hospitals. On Sunday, things went back to normal. On Monday and Tuesday, Atlanta Public Schools also halted many of its summer programs, saying that they would start up again once the water service was back on.
A break near downtown was fixed on Saturday, which meant that the city could lift the boil water warning that had been in place since Friday.
The breaks have brought to light the crumbling infrastructure that runs through Atlanta and many other big American towns.
Atlanta Chief Operating Officer LaChandra Burks told the city council on Monday afternoon, “What we have found by digging and digging and digging and looking at pipes is that we are fixing pipes from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and our infrastructure is falling apart.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers came to the city on Tuesday to help “discover and evaluate our old infrastructure,” as Dickens put it. But Burks pointed out that improving the city’s infrastructure will only help speed up fixes and not stop them from happening in the first place.
A study from Utah State University in December 2023 found that more than 30% of water mains in Canada and the US are over 50 years old. This is a problem that affects more than just Atlanta. The study found that water mains that are breaking down are usually 53 years old.
The study found that about 260,000 water main breaks happen every year in the US and Canada, which costs about $2.6 billion every year.
