Cell phone alerts or diarrhea? Which would you rather get?
Where were you last week when you found out the water wasn’t safe to drink?
I was at the Maya Angelou Library in northeast Wichita, where I sidled up to a drinking fountain and it was taped off with a sign advising that it was out of order due to a citywide boil-water order.
And this was actually better notification than I got on the last boil-water order in October.
That time, I was golfing with a friend at the Wichita Country Club. Being a country club, the golf carts are equipped with a picnic cooler stocked with complimentary bottled water, unlike the public courses I usually play.
Anyway, when we turned in our cart, the attendant asked us if we wanted to take home the left-over bottles from our cooler. When we said thanks, but it wasn’t necessary, she gave us a strange look, like we’d just passed up a free Bitcoin or something.
I found out why she was offering us take-home water when I got home and my wife told me that she’d seen on the news that there’d been a water main break and the entire city was under orders to boil tap water before drinking it, until further notice.
There’s got to be a better way to get the word out — and there is.
It’s called the Wireless Emergency Alert System and can be used to send alerts to cell phones, which almost everybody has these days.
We have that system here. We just don’t seem to use it.
Others do.
I know this because when I left the Angelou Library, I drove north to Overland Park and stayed overnight in my son’s apartment.
About 1:30 a.m., his phone went berserk. When I checked it, I found that we were under a tornado warning. My son, his cat and I sat it out in the bathroom for about 20 minutes until the danger passed.
The Wireless Emergency Alert System was established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A FEMA spokeswoman said a boil-water order is a perfectly acceptable use of the system.
But Sedgwick County doesn’t send out cell-phone alerts on boil-water orders because the officials in charge don’t consider it a life-threatening emergency.
“The worst we’re talking about here is people getting diarrhea or flu-like symptoms, maybe,” explained Cody Charvat, operations officer for emergency management. That seems a bit cavalier, because either of those could be very hard on the elderly or immune-compromised.
I understand there’s a balance there and that they don’t want to send out unnecessarily alerts.
It can be annoying, like when the TV stations break away from your favorite show to talk about a weather warning in McCook, Neb. In fact, those storm warnings are the only reason I even know there is a McCook, Neb., so I guess there’s some educational value to that.
And we’ve all been jolted awake in the middle of the night with Amber Alerts from Arkansas, or for flash floods in places we need to Google to even find out where they are.
The city and county are both working on systems to allow residents to opt in for alerts on lesser emergencies like water system problems.
City Manager Robert Layton said he’ll be meeting on that with his counterpart, County Manager Tom Stolz, who agrees there’s a need for improvement.
That’s a good long-term solution.
But we’re very likely to get hit with more boil-water orders in the not-too-distant future.
We’re building a new water treatment plant and it’s going to be impossible to do that without stressing some really old pipes.
I’d suggest we use the FEMA system for boil-water alerts until the city and county can get their opt-in systems up and running.
The sewer system is about as old and creaky as the water system. And I shudder to think what would happen to it, if all 500,000 of us were on the toilet with the trots at the same time.
This story was originally published June 14, 2022 at 12:00 AM.
