COLUMBUS, Ind. — Bartholomew County officials say it is not their responsibility to use the Everbridge county-wide warning and notification system to notify utility customers of “boil water” advisories, it is the responsibility of the utilities.
After a number of boil water advisories were issued in December by area water companies, the Bartholomew County Commissioners on Thursday discussed what should be the extent of the county’s involvement for notifying the public when their tap water may pose a health hazard.
Boil water advisories are generally sent out by utility companies after a water main or water line break, or work on water lines, that could have allowed hazardous substances, including E.coli bacteria, to infect the water.
The work session discussion, which included Bartholomew County Emergency Management Director Shannan Hinton and E911 emergency operations manager Todd Noblitt, were largely centered on whether the county’s nine-year-old Everbridge system should be used to notify residents of boil water advisories – also known as boil water orders or boil water notices.
Following the meeting, Hinton said the consensus was that these types of notifications are the responsibility of the utility company – not local government.
“Now, if it were a bigger situation like we had a couple of years ago, when there were a potentially contaminated well, that’s different,” Hinton said. “That is longer term and has a bigger effect on people, as opposed to an advisory calling for boiling water a couple of days.”
One issue with the Everbridge system is that it can’t instantly issue area-specific warnings for a boil water advisories as it does for the National Weather Service warnings, Hinton said.
“It would physically take a person to send that out,” the emergency management director said. “How much time would we spend doing that versus everything else?
For more on this story, see Saturday’s Republic.
