County officials didn’t hear from city when water crisis began, emergency director says
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Wichita boil water advisory
A major Wichita water main break on Oct. 7, 2021, led the Kansas Department of Heath and Environment to place the city and others that purchase water from its system under a boil water advisory.
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Sedgwick County officials complained Tuesday that the city of Wichita left the county out of the loop in responding to last week’s water emergency.
“We were behind the curve in receiving information. We did not like that,” said Julie Stimson, the county’s director of emergency management and the region’s top official for dealing with crises.
“There was a huge communication piece missing through a lot of this,” Stimson told county commissioners at their weekly staff meeting. “We were finding out the information about the same time you [commissioners] were, unfortunately.”
The county didn’t get notified by the city when a water main broke Thursday afternoon, lowering the pressure across Wichita and several other regional water utilities and putting more than 500,000 people under a boil-water advisory, Stimson said.
“Our first phone call was from a hospital and then we started reaching out to ask questions [of the city] and it wasn’t until the next morning when we finally got somebody on the phone to answer our specific questions,” she said.
County emergency workers went to the scene of the break near 17th and I-135, to assess the situation and still came away with questions unanswered.
“Even our health department was left in the dark on some of this stuff,” Stimson said.
City Manager Robert Layton was unavailable for comment.
Mayor Brandon Whipple said it was regrettable that the county was excluded.
The situation highlights the need for a form of rapid communication so that in an emergency, ordinary citizens could get a warning on their phone, officials said, an alert known locally as the Civic Ready system.
Stimson said the county is working in that direction, but it’s not there yet.
“A lot of discussion recently was about Civic Ready, and that is a vendor that we use that helps us with our emergency notification,” Stimson said.
“It’s an internal emergency notification system that we use to communicate with our partners in times of crisis. What the system does is you (commissioners) may have received an alert this morning about the severe weather we’re expecting this afternoon and that’s a prime example of how we use Civic Ready.”
But the problem at present is that it only works for government officials to communicate among themselves.
“At this time we do not have the capability for the public, the general public, to sign up to receive targeted notifications,” Stimson said.
“That is a capability that we are projecting for fiscal year 2022. We’ve collaborated with IT, Emergency Communications and our department to bring that capability to the county but we do not have that capability at this time. So we rely on our partners, the media, traditional media, social media to communicate with our public populations.”
Wichita Public Works and Utilities Director Alan King said a county-wide alert system could have been a helpful tool and his department has already been in talks with the county’s emergency management about partnering with them in the future.
“Not everyone gets their news the way that we think they do, which is through social media and news and radio and print,” King said. “Maybe we need to have another layer for those people who don’t use that way of getting their news.”
An expanded Civic Ready system “if it had been available to us, would have been very valuable,” King said. “We are very interested in looking to see what it would take for us to partner with (the county) in that regard.”
Both city and county officials said they’ll be meeting to figure out what went wrong and fix it for the next emergency.
“I think this situation has shown that we should develop a better system for getting information out, not just externally but internally as well,” Whipple said. “We are more than happy to work with our friends at the county and make sure for the next crisis we can face it head-on and side-by-side.”
He said the pipeline break had much of the city staff scrambling to isolate and stop the 2 million-gallon-an-hour leak, while others were working to get the word out to the general public as fast as possible.
At the county meeting, Commissioner Jim Howell was among those peeved that the county wasn’t included in the response from the start.
“When Wichita, they were obviously the first to note that there was a problem, it seems to me like they never did call you,” he told Stimson.
“Correct,” she replied.
Howell said that means that each community will need a plan that includes calling the county’s emergency services first.
“We’re the ones that are tasked with the responsibility by the state of Kansas to have these things figured out ahead of time,” Howell said. “So whatever the emergency is, every community across the county needs to know, first phone call is to Sedgwick County Emergency Management.”
Stimson agreed.
“That is exactly what needs to happen,” she said. “We’d much rather have a phone call and not need it to escalate, than not be informed of the situation where we could help collaborate resources and help communicate.”
Commissioner David Dennis said the situation may work out for the best and the mistakes made last week should point the way to what can be done better. He said he’s looking forward to an “after-action report” that the county and city will jointly prepare.
“This was a very small [emergency] honestly,” he said. “It affected a lot of people, but it’s not like a tornado coming through, a Category 5 through the middle of Wichita. So if we can learn from this so we can be prepared for the others, that’s what we’re looking for.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2021 at 5:08 PM.
