Poor regional coordination and outdated technology led to inconsistent messaging during Arlington’s boil water notice earlier this month, county staff say.
Confusion began after D.C. Water was the first to issue a boil water notice the night of July 3, due to potential contamination caused by algae blooms in the Potomac River.
At 10:22 p.m., the utility posted a tweet addressed to customers in D.C., at the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery and Reagan National Airport. The full advisory warned customers to “discard any beverages and ice made after 9 p.m.” that day.
DC Water issued a Boil Water Advisory today for all customers in the District of Columbia, as well as the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery and Reagan National Airport, due to a drop in water supply from the Washington Aqueduct. To read full info visit https://t.co/fBvaUg2oFG pic.twitter.com/Wlyh3Thif7
— DC Water (@dcwater) July 4, 2024
This move, County Manager Mark Schwartz told Arlington County Board members at a Tuesday meeting, caught other agencies in the D.C. area off guard.
“They jumped ahead of everybody else in the news cycle,” he said. “We were all trying to line up our announcements at the same time. That went out before the county was able to send out a notice to all our residents and all our businesses, so that led to a fair amount of confusion.”
An Arlington press release came out minutes later, at 10:30 p.m., saying that almost the entire county was under a boil water advisory, save a small portion served by Fairfax County’s system. The release cited “higher levels of turbidity” in water at the aqueduct.
ARLnow notified readers in a breaking news story that triggered email and text alerts roughly 10 minutes after that.
However, the Arlington Alert system — designed to provide real-time notifications about emergencies — lagged behind, reaching email inboxes around 11:30 p.m., over an hour after D.C.’s boil water notice. A county-triggered Wireless Emergency Alert message buzzed on phones across Arlington around the same time.
“After a while, mostly everything was kind of synchronized,” County Board Vice-Chair Takis Karantonis said on Tuesday. “But for a critical hour and a half or two hours, they weren’t.”
Immediately after D.C. Water’s announcement, some customers in the region had rushed to stores to buy water. Within 20 minutes of a push alert, the Washington Post reported, gallon containers of water had vanished from the shelves of a Safeway on Capitol Hill. Similarly, ARLnow observed bare bottled water shelves at at least one Arlington retailer.
But discrepancies between the notices from D.C. Water and Arlington County left some residents unsure about what to do.
im really confused bc dc water said the only parts of arlington impacted were the pentagon, the cemetery, and dca and thats all thats on the map too but i got an alert for all of arlington says the whole county should boil water… pic.twitter.com/BB2NnFXAqt
— mol 🧸 (@molfully) July 4, 2024
The county is now seeking to improve its wireless emergency announcements, which rely on software that is about 30 years old, Schwartz said. It is also instituting new training for public information officers when coordinating regional messaging, the county manager said.
All boil water notices, the county manager stressed, were precautionary and no D.C-area residents were ever actually in harm’s way.
“The bottom line here is, at all times the water was safe,” he said. “The communications could have been better, and we’re working on that.”
The county has requested an after-action report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has said that in future algae blooms it has received permission to mitigate water quality issues chemically.
In the event of a future region-wide boil water advisory, Schwartz believes the county and its regional partners have made enough changes to ensure a more consistent response.
“I’m actually pretty sure this particular problem won’t happen again,” he said. “It’s the question of what’s next, that we haven’t really anticipated.”
