City shuts off rural Georgia hospital’s water for nonpayment, locals say
City of Ocilla officials cut off the water to Irwin County Hospital for unpaid water bills Monday, prompting a callout by the public for donated water, according to residents who spoke to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Hospital workers who answered the phone Tuesday told an AJC reporter the water is back on. Ocilla Mayor Melvin Harper did not answer questions from the AJC about the matter.
“We rallied the troops” on social media, and locals delivered pallets of water during the brief outage, said Becky Cook, a community advocate who attends hospital board meetings and posts the videos on her social media accounts.
The hospital’s CEO, James Nixon, told the AJC in written statements that the service interruption was “brief and limited” and “At no point were patient care, clinical operations, or emergency services impacted.” He said the hospital had its own backup water supply if needed.
Harper told Albany-based WALB, which first reported the story, in a written statement Tuesday that the hospital owed more than $20,000 in past-due water bills. The city suspended domestic and portable water services after “numerous attempts over the years and several additional months” to collect payment from the hospital were unsuccessful, according to the WALB report.
Ocilla Councilman Chris Paulk told the AJC he learned about the cutoff from Facebook.
“Nobody has said anything (to me) about the hospital being an issue” in regards to past-due water bills, Paulk said. City water department employees report to the mayor.
“I have no problem with people or entities being held accountable,” he said. “But there’s always a process, and there’s different processes for an emergency place or a place of refuge for the sick and elderly.”
Several residents noted the hospital also supplies water to a kitchen that serves an attached nursing home, where residents require meals specialized for their health needs.
Nixon, the hospital leader, said that a combination of factors contributed to the shut-off, including unpaid bills, credits that hadn’t been applied, and ”informal or inconsistent communication regarding payment timing."
He said he’d been brought on board to stabilize operations and was optimistic. “Irwin County Hospital remains open, operational, and committed to serving this community safely and reliably,” he said.
Irwin County Hospital’s reports to the state from 2023, the most recent year available, show a struggling operation with just a trickle of patients, often mothers about to give birth. It showed four of 28 babies that year did not survive.
The facility is in Ocilla, geographically between two bigger and much busier hospitals: one 15 minutes away in Fitzgerald, and a major regional medical center in Tifton just over an hour away.
Irwin County Hospital may not be a destination of choice for specialty care, but locals need the hospital to be there when something sudden and urgent strikes, Cook said.
“We’re a farming community,” Cook said. “You need someplace because farming accidents are very common. You need someplace for stabilization. It’s here.”
A report by the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina last year listed Irwin County Hospital as one of hundreds of rural facilities nationwide that were financially at risk of closure, and further endangered by the federal health funding cuts passed last summer in President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
About the Author
Ariel Hart is a reporter on health care issues. She works on the AJC’s health team and has reported on subjects including the Voting Rights Act and transportation.
