282 apartments without water after main fails

A water main break in DeKalb County has disrupted service to residents of a Chamblee area apartment complex since Saturday night, the latest in a series of water-related problems in the county.

Tenants of the Park Point North apartments on Mercer University Drive couldn’t shower or draw drinking water from their taps after the failure of a 48-inch water main that served the complex. The county delivered gallon water jugs to residents as work crews awaited a part they needed to repair the pipe.

“It’s a pretty big main, but it’s isolated,” Sandra Leavell, spokeswoman for the county’s watershed management department, said Monday. She said the outage affected only “a few” apartment units and that officials hoped to complete the repair by Monday evening.

Apartment manager Maynard Stamper said 282 occupied apartments with one to three bedrooms were without water. He said county workers delivered water once: 75 gallons on Monday morning. He also said he called the county’s information line Monday afternoon and was told officials didn’t know when the water would come back on.

Tenants were angry about the situation. Patricia Garcia said she was contemplating a third night at a motel and complained that she couldn’t get information out of the county when she called.

“We’re talking about unsanitary conditions,” she said. “I think this is outrageous and it should be considered an emergency.”

Candice Dranikoski lives in an apartment with her husband and three children, one of them a baby. They’ve been taking sponge baths. “It’s been rough,” she said. “They brought gallons of water, but they’re gone. … We have way more than 75 gallons’ worth of people here without water.”

The break near Spaghetti Junction was the latest in a series of mishaps affecting the county’s water supply. In June and July, brief electrical outages caused losses of water pressure affecting most of the county, with the last one triggering a boil water advisory lasting two days. A 36-inch water main break near Decatur in December 2006 triggered a three-day boil water advisory.