Once in a blue moon.

Saturday, June 27th, 2020

36 inch water main break at Hemphill and Ferst, from 11alive.com

Early in the afternoon a very large water main broke just north of the Georgia Tech campus, pretty much due west of here. Within 60 seconds, the twitter world was speckled with tweets asking something along the lines of “anyone know whats going on with the water in atlanta? it seems like it suddenly shut off in multiple neighborhoods.“ Our house never lost water, but the pressure dropped.

We (because we’re old fashioned) watched on the 10:00 pm television news an Atlanta watershed spokesperson say that the large pipe just “gave way”, something that might happen, y’know, “once in a blue moon.”

The end result, we’re under a Boil Water Advisory, out of the famed abundance of caution that we seem to have these days in such abundance.

I think most neighborhoods have water again into this evening (but, y’know, boil it) and we find ourselves confronted with the reality that using good ol’ Atlanta water to frequently wash our hands, sanitize our dishes and surfaces, and so on represents a new complexity to be worked around in a state with unsettlingly high rates of Covid-19 infection and hospital admission.

And, again, we’re among the fortunate: a line of storms came through late in the afternoon and knocked out some (other) peoples’ power.

It’d be nice to be able to pause the usual infrastructure crises during this global health one, but of course, that’s never the case.

But boy, that one break sure messed up the Saturday of a lot of Atlantans.