Four forty in the morning

A main lets go at four forty in the morning. Pressure drops on the north side of the system and now I have got a presumptive contamination event and a regulatory clock, and the clock does not care that I have three people and one of them is on vacation.

The notice itself is not hard. Boil one minute, dont drink it, dont brush your teeth with it, here is where the bottled water is, we will tell you when it is over. That is four sentences and I can write it in my sleep, which is good, because I basically am.

Getting those four sentences to nine thousand connections is where my whole morning goes. Reverse-911 hits the numbers on file, and the numbers on file are landlines from 2009 in a county where nobody has a landline. Facebook reaches whoever the feed feels like. The radio station picks it up at six. And then there is the part that used to keep me up, which is that we have got two substantial households of people here who do not read English — the crews at the poultry plant and their families, and a Marshallese community that has been here twenty years and that the county has honestly never figured out how to talk to.

The old answer was that I called a lady at the church who called four other people, and somewhere between hour six and hour eleven the message got where it needed to go, more or less, in a version I could not verify. Eleven hours. On a boil-water notice. I have never said that out loud to a state inspector and I am not thrilled to be typing it now.

What we do now is I open the channel on my phone from the truck, at the break, standing in the water, and I talk for two minutes. Not four sentences — I actually explain it, because I have got time to explain it now, and because people do what you tell them when they understand why. And a resident opens the link and picks the language they want and hears me say it. Same two minutes, same hour, same voice. The link is the same one thats been on the back of the water bill for a year, so its not something anybody had to go find at four in the morning.

I want to be careful here because I am not going to claim this made us compliant with anything. Our counsel and our Title VI coordinator worked through where it fits in our language access plan and that is their call, not mine and not a vendor's. What I will say is the operational thing: the eleven hours went away. The call volume at the office went down, hard, because people were not calling to ask what the siren meant. And the second time we ran it, for a planned shutdown, I had people show up at the water station who had never once come to anything the county did. Turns out they had been getting told about it late for twenty years and had quit expecting to be told at all.