This is why I think something like mastodon works really well for government, public works or any service that wants Twitter/Facebook like notifications without all the bullshit like having to deal with all negatives of having those accounts.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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More options in general would be nice. Sign up for email or something even!
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I informed someone that had recently moved to the area that there was a water main break and you had to boil water. They brought me a jug of water from Walmart as a thanks. Now we are married. Go tell random attractive people.
I'll keep that in mind if I ever get divorced!
That can easily be done by cell broadcasts (which can absolutely have different stages of priority nowadays), mass-SMS (every cellphone that first registers in an affected area gets a SMS, via designated disaster management apps, by placing handouts on peoples doors (you usually do that by identify people at risks e.g. homecare patients, then you go by high to low risk areas - depending on the search of the contamination) and last but not least a few trucks with loudspeakers (even regular cop cars do) do wonders.
What happens here if someone is not at home when called, is not an actual customer of the water company, etc.?
There are dozens of better ways than how this was handled in OPs case.
Source: I consult community and disaster response organisations on this stuff.
Ideally the advisory is going out over the radio too. People will hear it while driving and then spread by word of mouth.
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Honest question, what method of alerting would you have suggested? Looks like they tried 4 different things at once - none perfect, but I'm not sure any would be
Around my place when they were digging up the neighborhoods water lines they literally left a note on your door.
They leave two here. One saying there is a boil advisory and another after the tests come back saying it's safe.
Around a neighborhood is one thing. An entire town could be a hell of a lift, not to mention that there are still problems with notes on doors (I usually go in and out through my garage; the front door is rarely used)
Junk mail manages it? I imagine it's not hard to say to the postal service, here are 5000 flyers, please give everyone one.
It's even easier to respond with
"sorry, it's a Sunday on a holiday weekend"
"Our carriers are halfway done with their route for the day, we're not paying them overtime to go back"
"Our sorting system is already done and the trucks are loaded up"
"I haven't checked my mail for a few days" (as the recipient of that flyer)
Everything you said is valid, and in my experience mailings easily take a week to orchestrate.
If you have to send out 5,000 letters, you have to first print 5k letters — assuming the local water department already has a robust template in place, and it doesn’t wind up dragged on by reviews and approvals.
If they haven’t made generic prints to keep in stock, they have to have their own print facilities, or have an on-call printer capable of dropping all other work to deal with emergencies, or possibly taking on work outside of business hours.
Even then, it’s a minimum turnaround of a day. The mail has to go into the system, be sorted and sent to local post offices, then given to mail carriers. The few times I did direct mail, they estimated a minimum of 3 days to deliver, even when dropping off first thing in the morning and the addressee was in the same city.
Even if they managed to get next day delivery, they’d still have a 24h delay in which people could be drinking contaminated water.
Boil water advisories are often immediate - like a check valve has failed unexpectedly and there is, this very instant, a risk if sewage in your tap water.
Hard to mobilize a city-wide door-to-door campaign with such urgency.
As a secondary option, sure. But it's not always like a planned-for-months water main replacement.
The four channels OP listed do seem inadequate though.
This sounds like an emergency situation, a broken main, versus someone digging. These get discovered when Joe schmo turns his water on and it's brown, no pressure, or someone driving down the street encounters a flood on a sunny day. They contact the water company, and the water company then identifies the problem. Time is continuing to pass as this all occurs.
Water utility calls every account holder affected by the outage. They post online. They notify the town and the town posts on their website. Dunno what this "system no one knows about" is, but around me there's a service called Nixle that I use, and you'll get text messages about things, including water main breaks and boil water advisories.
we should combine whatever system with weather alerts
A competent state would go door to door, not make those affected constantly seek out this type of information. It is a basic public healtg failure.
My water district has 55,000 customers, many of whom won't answer their doors thinking it's a solicitor. Even if they did, you could have dozens of people going door to door and it would still take forever
You drive door to door leaving flyers. Small crowds of teenagers and college students do this for political campaigns. Why do you think municipal or county staff can't drive, knock on doors, or drop flyers? You can easily do 100-200 houses per hour if it's just flyers and no converdationd. You can do the whole thing in a day with 50 people.
It feels like you'd think the US Postal Service is an outlandish fairy tale. "They do what!? Drop of letters and packages to every address? That would take years!"
Ok, where do you get those 50 people?
Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone's door?
Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there's probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.
Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they're actually going to show up.
We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?
Maybe we'll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?
But let's say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)
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Phone is really the only one of those that’s helpful. It’s not really considered common practice to regularly check your water companies website or Facebook and for something as important as a water boil advisory it should be sent out at least through email in addition to phone
Everyone has email, and text is also a good option.
My local town alerts come through both, with more urgent alerts like if a fire starts nearby through an automated phone call.
Email, text, neighbors app, nextdoor. There is even the rave alerts that many cities use. No reason why a notice can't be blasted on all channels in emergencies.
Personally I'd like to sign up for email alerts. I'm not the person who pays the water bill, so I won't get the phone alerts. But I'm still living here, so it would be nice to still get those somehow.
I would have preferred it in the form of a limerick, but that’s why I listen to NPR.
If you live near Pawtucket,
Do not drink from the communal bucket.
The local water stinks,
So I only drinks,
Bottled water or vodka, so fuck it.
This comment sounds like Carl Kasell.
The town crier and carrier pigeons, as well as the Nextdoor app. Idk who uses Nextdoor, but 30 other people could've known.
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Wow. We had that once. Well, we were advised to not drink tap water at all. For us someone with a megaphone drove through every street and neighbours made sure that everyone got that.
We go the extra mile. It will makes us look good. Therefore we only announce it on corporate social media.
Useless with getting news out, useless in preventing a dictator from taking control.
American militias as mentioned in the second amendment are really no actual use, are they?
through phone if you have a phone on your water account
To be fair, that should cover like 95% of people. Very rare these days to be able to set up a utility WITHOUT a phone number.
The phone number is not required for the accounts here. Also there's a lot of people that misses. It only covers one person in our three person household, and only one person in my mother's five person household. Luckily the person who pays the water here told us. My mother's husband absolutely would not tell three of the other people in their household until after someone drank the water cause not his job to let people know he says.
cause not his job to let people know he says.
wow.... that's.... sorry you have to live with someone like that.
Despite what my mother's husband thinks, I've never been a member of his household. My twin, who was, lives with me now.
He'd tell my mother, but not his own sons or my twin. (My mother, once she knew, would have told everyone else in the household. Luckily they've never had a water boil down there)
I don't like him very much.
yeah seems like a charming troglodyte. chudworthy.
Eeey complain about it and it's been lifted. Which I learned from spam refreshing the website because I am not the water bill person.
Must be nice to have your problem. During COVID-19, my county health department kept sending area alarms with emergency messages during COVID-19, most of which contained no actual useful information about threats or change of status to regulations and were just reminding people to social-distance.
They also robo-called landlines with the same messages.
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