The township is under a water boil advisory. They decided the way to inform people was on the website, through phone if you have a phone on your water account, through a system no one knew existed, or Facebook.
They’re offering a case of water per household for free though!
That announcement was only through Facebook. Great. All gone.
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!
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.
More options in general would be nice. Sign up for email or something even!
Four options isn’t enough? I get you didn’t get it, but do you want them to knock on your door?
I subscribe to a service called Nixle, and the water company will email and phone is anytime there is an issue. I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to be doing. If you’re hard to find you’re hard to find. Definitely sucks to find out there’s a boil water advisory after you’ve been chugging water all morning though.
You shouldn’t need an app or have to subscribe to a third party service to know if your water is safe to drink.
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.
They had four methods in OP’s case. OP describes “a system no one knows about,” which sounds like a system OP doesn’t know about. They call you, unless you refused to put your phone number on your account, and then what? Are they supposed to go door to door? It’s an emergency.
The entitlement here is staggering. If you want to be informed, you gotta give them a way to inform you. If you hide away for whatever reason, you run the risk of missing announcements.
I literally told you the actual scientific approach that is currently used by disaster response management professionals. The methods used in OPs case are utterly insufficient and potentially dangerous. I also gave you an example why.
So…
through phone if you have a phone on your water account, through a system no one knew existed
I interpreted this as one system. So its:
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Water website, you’d have to happen to stumble upon
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Obscure opt-in phone system
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Facebook
If that’s the case, the complaint is reasonable, as the water service is basically assuming Facebook (and word of mouth) are the only active notifications folks need.
But yeah, if OP opted out of SMS warnings or something, that’s more on them.
I didn’t get text alerts because I am not the person who pays the water! Also those only happen if you have a phone connected to the account which is absolutely not required and several people in the area did not know about.
The “system no one knew about” was the township app. Which is a thing, sort of. Sometimes works. Different system. Four total things. Website, Facebook, text alerts if you are paying for water and have a phone connected, and a township app. Which the township apparently recently changed to a different app thing.
Yeah, see, that makes sense. A random app and an optional account number are not reliable notification systems. They can’t just assume everyone will opt into those.
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I don’t know what country you’re in but in my country there are very specific regulations that outline how your water provider MUST give written or verbal notice. If you don’t have a phone number or email attached to your account there’s a chance that there’s a letter for you in in the mail and has not reached you yet. If not you might have a case with the ombudsman.
USA! So all our regulations are leaving. They said what methods they used, I listed all four! So no letters.
They do send letters or put notes on doors if its a planned outage though.
Oh weird that they wouldn’t have the same requirement for a boil water advisory. I know our regulatory body requires we use ‘reasonable endeavours’ to determine a customer’s preferred method of communication, and ‘meet the discrete communications needs of customers as required on a case-by-case basis.’
But again… Different country so who even knows what’s required in your state/district. How frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
Ok, where do you get those 50 people?
There are places that regularly do this. Where do you think they get enough people to visit and/or mail every address? Who works at the post office? Cops? First responders? Utility workers? Social workers? Delivery drivers?
This is not just a failure of imagination, it is trying to pretend this kind of operation doesn’t already happen every day right where you live.
Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?
Why would they need to?
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.
Yes you are taking people off of other jobs to do this. Why would they all be working on the problem that caused the boil notice? Do you think your mailman is cranking on water mains?
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.
If you wanted to use volunteers you would do it by having a group ready to meet up, get trained, and then do these kinds of tasks when needed. You would get their phone numbers in advance and then call around to get together a group. This is how all civil volunteer groups work. Search and rescue. Emergency volunteer firefighters. This is an everyday thing and very basic. Why imply it’s impractical?
We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?
The governor could do that, yes. They mobilize very quickly, they do evacuations for natural disasters. They train for this kind of logistics thing. But sending notice in the mail would be much cheaper.
Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?
“What about [stupid thing]? You’re so dumb for thinking the thing I just made up.”
But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable.
The US is car-dependent. You would use cars. Those owned by the authority, municipalities, owned by USPS, cop cars, etc. How do you think your mail works? Purely pedestrian?
Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use?
For an area with 55,000 people? Yes you have 50 vehicles that could be used, though you don’t need 50 because you can do 2-3 per car if you’re doing the door knocking strategy.
And yes most municipal vehicles are “on standby”. Tons sit in parking lots all day. Ask your county about their staff vehicles and the reservation process.
Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans?
Why would they need to?
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)
Could be. Depends on exactly how incompetent the water authority is. As we can see, publishing info in the internet equivalent of a dark corner in a broom closet is a strategy they actually went with.
They are liable for this and can opt for as expensive snd dumb or cheap and efficient of a method they’d like.
You can drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, but when you go door to door it’s almost certainly on foot. My parents live in an older neighborhood with mailboxes at the front doors, and unless we had a package they never had the truck on our street. It was always parked a block away while the carrier went on foot going from door to door.
And no, I don’t think the water company would have an army of 50 people ready to do an organized canvas of the town (unlike the Postal Service, which has a roster of dedicated mail carriers)
This is literally something that already happens every day for junk mailers and junk from Amazon and you’re trying to die on the hill of saying it’s basically impossible. There are regions where direct verbal or written notice is required by law. These are things that happen and happen efficiently and in very boring ways, despite your continued attempts to argue about this from the position of, “nuh-uh it’s too hard” ad nauseum.
And this is in defense of instead publishing this information in a dark corner as if it’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’."
And no, I don’t think the water company would have an army of 50 people ready to do an organized canvas of the town (unlike the Postal Service, which has a roster of dedicated mail carriers)
Paying 50 people for one day of flyering is an army? How much do you think it costs to send a letter? A water boil notice already means they have failed their own liability and could cause very serious and expensive harms. Yes they have to pay for that (possibly literal) shit.
Just admit you were being silly, not clever, and move on.
Naw, I think “but we have cars” was silly, not clever (funny how you dropped that pretty quickly). I think “but you can get people and a plan immediately while also fixing the problem” is silly, not clever (admittedly places that require certain notices will also have a plan to implement it as required by law, not I’m thinking about wherever OP is which I’m assuming doesn’t have that). I think comparing with organizations that need large coverage for their daily operations (not necessarily 100% of homes in a day, mind you) is silly, not clever.
Feel free to move on.
Naw, I think “but we have cars” was silly, not clever (funny how you dropped that pretty quickly).
Hmm I never said that. You’d rather make stuff up than acknowledge an everyday thing is actually entirely feasible?
I think “but you can get people and a plan immediately while also fixing the problem” is silly, not clevet (admittedly places that require certain notices will also have a plan to implement it as required by law, not I’m thinking about wherever OP is which I’m assuming doesn’t have that).
Thanks for explaining how your idea that this can only be done ad hoc is actually dumb, refuting your own point!
I think comparing with organizations that need large coverage for their daily operations (not necessarily 100% of homes in a day, mind you) is silly, not clever.
What are you even talking about? Use your words.
Feel free to move on.
But your bad faith obstinance is funny. You can go ahead and ignore my advice and embarrass yourself as much as you’d like.
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.
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.
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.
I would have preferred it in the form of a limerick, but that’s why I listen to NPR.
The town crier and carrier pigeons, as well as the Nextdoor app. Idk who uses Nextdoor, but 30 other people could’ve known.
Town Crier
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?
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.
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.
