MONDAY, OCTOBER 26 IN HOUSATONIC
It was early Monday morning in a house on Pleasant Street in Housatonic and Cecilia Turner had just gotten her older child out the door for school. Ping went a text from a neighbor, with a photo of brown water, and a by-now familiar question: “How’s your water this morning?”
It was, says Turner, a “here we go again” moment.
On Main Street Andreas Engel acknowledged that he’d ignored the text alerts about the water work because they’d looked, as he put it, “spammy.” When he realized he had no water he went down with the dog to see firsthand what was going on, and saw the water main work going on at Front and South Streets. Later on in the day he talked to an annoyed neighbor who, he said, “saw that they’d patched up the hole, there were no workmen there, they had said that the work was done, but we still had no water.” That neighbor had been calling the company all day, but, “There was nobody answering the phone. Everything was being directed to voicemail.”
Main Street’s Julie Kunz says she had no idea there was no water at her house until arriving home after a long day or working outdoors and trying to turn on the shower. She took a shower at a friend’s house instead.
Over on Oak Street Theresa Tatro hadn’t gotten any warning about the water either, but she sw a road-closed sign, and when she also went to investigate, she could see crews digging. By about 9 a.m. she realized it wasn’t going to be a low pressure water day, as one neighbor reported that she’d been told, or a “roily” water day, to borrow the word Housatonic Water Works favors to describe its brown water, but rather a no water day.
Tatro would be without water in the house she shares with her teenage daughter and elderly mother.
Engel would be without water for himself and his dog.
Kunz had no water for herself and her middle school-aged son.
Turner would be without water to care for her six-month-old daughter.
No showers, no baby bath, no hand-washing, no toilet flushing, no meals requiring water.
Turner and other Housatonic residents went to that evening’s Great Barrington Selectboard meeting, as The Village Green reported, to give testimony on the water situation, where their comments were followed by a board vote of 5-0 to formally oppose any rate increase by Housatonic Water Works, and to inform DPU of their opposition.
In interviews Tuesday, the Housatonic residents described a communications void when it came to the single most important component in any living creature’s day, access to clean, plentiful water. They had to piece together what was happening from neighbors, Facebook, making on-site estimates themselves and a late-day notice on the town website, rather than directly from the company that supplies their water.
The stated work to be done was a valve box replacement at Front and South Streets. Households had no water, rather than the predicted low water pressure. The outage reached well beyond “near the center of town,” which sounds confined to the blocks immediately around Front and South. Based on comments to Housatonic Neighbors, the shut-off extended as far Main, Highland, Oak, Prospect, Hart, Kirk and High Streets.
WHAT CUSTOMERS WERE TOLD
On Friday October 23 and Saturday October 24 Housatonic Water Works posted notices about valve replacement work to be done on Monday, October 26th that would cause “low water pressure” or “temporary interruptions” and which that would finished by later afternoon. They used Great Barrington’s Code Red alert system, and also its own Facebook page, which has 157 followers. But the alert system is opt-in only and does not include anywhere near all 850-off HWW customers. There are clearly other issues with the system as Julie Kunz moved to town nearly two years ago, is signed up for the CodeRed alerts, and did not receive any news about the water shut-off.
Turner’s husband, Selectboard member Ben Elliott, is signed up for CodeRed, but as Andreas Engel had also found, he had to click through other notices to see any one detail, as a CodeRed alert “could be anything.” For their busy household, she said, a Friday notice for Monday work is easy to lose track of, because, for them, “Friday and Monday are years apart.”
Tatro said she didn’t get the robocall from the CodeRed system because she doesn’t check her home voicemail. Rather she says she found the notice on the Great Barrington town website, which required some proactive hunting on her part.
There were apparently no reminder notices posted Sunday or early Monday.
On Monday afternoon at 5:37 pm HWW sent residents a notification the work was done and water would soon be coming back on line, but as many frustrated customers complained on the Housatonic Neighbors board, the water only started to trickly back online sometime around 7 pm for some customers and after that for others.
Turner said her water returned around 7 p.m. at low pressure and built back up overnight. Tatro’s was still off when she returned home at 9.
On Tuesday, Turner said her water was back to normal, if “a little cloudy.”
Many said they were awakened by a phone call and text at midnight saying that the water would be gradually returning to normal flow over the next hours.
“really poor communication,” Engel commented online.
“All of us, all the neighbors,” he described, “we’re all like talking to each other, like, ‘What’s going on?’ We were mad. Thankfully, it’s not freezing outside, but you know, my heat is all water radiator heat. So I was thinking is the tank in my house is gonna ultimately empty out of water, and I’m not gonna have heat in the house?”
He said he’s often only found out what’s happening with the water by asking his neighbor Eric Gabriel, Vice Chair of the Selectboard, who’s more in the know. Turner said when it comes to communication in general, there is “always at least one person between me and the company telling me about my water.”
‘JUST TELL ME’
For Tatro, the difference between “low pressure” and “no water” is the whole story. With low pressure you can still flush a toilet and wash your hands. With none, you need a five-gallon jug by the sink and buckets of water to pour into the toilet. She said she would have bought those ahead of time if she’d known.
“Just tell me the water is gonna be turned off, and I can make arrangements.”
Many Housatonic households have switched from bottled water to home filtration systems, she noted, but those don’t help when nothing comes through the pipes.
“It’s a big deal to be without water for nine hours,” she said.
To Tatro the outage underscored how much power one man holds over the village: “He’s got water in his hands for all of us.”