Comment on Water Boil Advisory
spongebue@lemmy.world 1 day agoIt’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)
Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
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.