ERIE COUNTY, N.Y. (WIVB)- More than 200 people affected by the water main breaks across Erie County called into a town hall meeting held over the phone by the Erie County Water Authority.
The ECWA started the phone call by giving a timeline of events surrounding the water main break in Amherst Wednesday night. Chairman Earl Jann said ECWA wasn’t invited to the emergency meeting county officials held after the break.
Jann said they did not recommend a boil water notice be issued but the Health Department went ahead with it, without submitting the required written notice to ECWA. He later explained boil water alerts are issued if ECWA notices a dangerous pressure drop or if the Health Department decides it’s necessary.
Jann told customers over the phone that the Health Department told him the order to give a boil notice came from County Executive Mark Poloncarz.
Commissioner of Health Dr. Gale Burstein responded to News 4 and said they consulted state officials for advice on whether to issue the alert after they discovered there had been a drop in pressure after the Amherst water main break.
“The State Health Department strongly encouraged us to move forward with this boil water notification, especially because it affected such a large part of Erie County,” said Dr. Burstein. “Dolores Funke, who is head of Erie County’s Department of Health’s Environmental Health division, was stationed at the Erie County Water Authority service center and worked closely with their executive director together, collaboratively to write this boil water notification.”
One caller told ECWA it took days before she knew of the boil notice. Many callers wanted to know what ECWA will do to better notify customers in the future.
Jann said they are working on an emergency notification system and plans to roll out a text alert system soon.
“We were looking at all of those options,” said Jann. “Some of them we couldn’t do because of our aged computer system, some of them it was a question of analyzing those things but we have been looking at them and we fully intend to implement better systems of communication.”
Jann stressed aging infrastructure has been a major factor in the breaks but said they also learned National Grid was digging in that area and they believe that may have caused the problem.
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