Comment on Water Boil Advisory
chloroken@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agoAround my place when they were digging up the neighborhoods water lines they literally left a note on your door.
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.
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 calorie of doing all other work to deal with emergencies, or possibly 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.
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.
glitch1985@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They leave two here. One saying there is a boil advisory and another after the tests come back saying it’s safe.