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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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!”
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.
Town Crier
The town crier and carrier pigeons, as well as the Nextdoor app. Idk who uses Nextdoor, but 30 other people could’ve known.
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.
