Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul and City Manager Eden Freeman met with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to make sure everyone knows who to call in case of another water emergency like the one that occurred over the weekend.
“This weekend was rather trying for our community when we lost water in a large section of town. And tragically, this is the second time that’s happened in about the last decade, where we had a systemwide failure that affected virtually all of the city,” Paul said at the start of the Sandy Springs City Council’s work session on June 20.
Paul and Freeman met with city staff and discovered that a book created to outline emergency situations lacked a section on water emergencies. That will be corrected, he said.
Paul encouraged community members to sign up for the Sandy Springs Alerts system on the city’s website.
“That is our best way of keeping people informed about what’s going on, whether it’s something like we had this week, this weekend, or in the future where there’s a weather alert or whatever. Occasionally we get wind and snow and people want to know what’s going on,” he said.
Paul also said information will be made easier to find on the city’s website also and social media and other means of communication will also be utilized to alert residents.
The mayor said the city found out about this weekend’s outage when people started calling in and asking, “Where’s our water?” A boil water advisory was in effect until Tuesday morning.
That’s when city officials reached out to the city of Atlanta and learned they were doing work on the Roswell side of the Chattahoochee River on the main trunk line that feeds Sandy Springs with water from Johns Creek.
Paul said it took a while after making calls to the water commissioner and the chief of staff for Atlanta to find out what happened.
Divers had to go look for the break, which was under the Chattahoochee River. As they searched, a lightning storm forced them to take the divers out of the river, causing a delay. The divers discovered a gate valve had blown off. A replacement had to be fabricated and then divers had to go back into the river to install it.
“So there was about a 24-hour period there where we had what I would call it at least a water emergency if not a water crisis,” Paul said.
The mayor apologized to the community, saying the city is generally pretty good at communicating during emergencies, but didn’t meet standards this weekend by using all available platforms.
