Atlanta Watershed Commissioner Al Wiggins told city council members Monday that city workers did their best to make the repairs to broken water mains over the weekend as efficiently as possible and with the least-possible impact on customers.
Wiggins said there was no reason to believe there was a relationship between breaks Friday at Joseph E. Boone Boulevard, and another early Sunday morning at 11th Street and West Peachtree Street in Midtown.
LaChandra Burks, the city’s interim chief operating officer, told council members: “We are repairing pipes from 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and our infrastructure is crumbling.”
Burks said city officials have spoken with federal agencies, which she didn’t specifically name, and that the city is “going to bring in the best and brightest to help us take an assessment of our system to figure out what things we need to do to have a better infrastructure in place.”
Councilman Alex Wan asked Burks and Wiggins which part of the city’s administration was responsible for communicating with the public throughout the water ordeal.
“Think about the public,” Wan said.
In response, Wiggins said: “It’s the whole government. It’s a team effort.”
Frustration about the outage spilled out in the council meeting’s public comment period and during a news conference at City Hall.
“Atlanta residents have been prevented from cooking meals. Many of our workplaces have been shut down. Hospital patients have been moved out of the city,” said Kirkwood resident Matthew Nursey during the council meeting’s public comment period.
“This is unacceptable,” he said, adding that he appreciated watershed employees who have worked to fix the water mains. “We’ve seen burning bridges, potholes swallowing cars. And now the city’s water access is knocked out of operation with abysmal communication and transparency.”
At the news conference, Devin Barrington-Ward, managing director of the Black Futurists Group, said businesses “need water to do ... everything.”
He said the interruption of business and profits for local companies due to the water main break was “unacceptable.”
Barrington-Ward spoke to media just as the city council meeting was starting Monday, saying he is seeking a city council emergency ordinance to establish a $5 million small business water crisis relief fund.
He proposes such a fund be used to provide financial assistance of up to $10,000 for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees and annual gross receipts of less than $5 million and up to $25,000 for medium-sized businesses with 50-250 employees and annual gross receipts of less than $25 million.
Barrington-Ward, a former city council candidate, said he has spoken to many small business owners in the city, “and every time you speak to them, they’re saying the same thing: I lost tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.”
“That’s when it impacts people’s bottom line, their ability to pay rent, other overhead costs that are associated with operating a business in the city of Atlanta, due to no fault of their own,” Barrington-Ward said.
“We have known that the infrastructure in the city has been falling apart for years,” Barrington-Ward said. “We have all these nice new shiny buildings, but our streets are crumbling and our streets are trash and our sewer system doesn’t work.”
The pipe that burst was able to shut down operations in much of the city even though it “wasn’t a terrorist attack. This wasn’t a natural disaster. This was just pure negligence.”
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