Atlanta Boil Water Map Shows Area Impacted as State of Emergency Declared
NewsweekMay 21
Atlanta Recovering From Water Main Breaks
Above: Atlanta Waste Water System, contractor work following flood incident. October 13, 2009. Image copyright: FEMA Photo Library via Wikimedia Commons
The Facts
Downtown Atlanta, Georgia, and its nearby neighborhoods Sunday were experiencing the end of a two-day water outage that was caused by the two major water main breaks.
Democratic first-term mayor Andre Dickens said Saturday that one of the two mains had been repaired. But the city was still under an order to boil water before drinking it, and officials were still distributing bottled water at some fire stations.
The Spin
Narrative A
The mayor has shown his lack of experience and has proven he's totally overwhelmed by this infrastructure crisis. He was slow to communicate to the community and leaving people in the dark on this matter put them at risk. This could cost him his job when reelection rolls around.
Narrative B
The mayor admits he may have had some missteps as this situation unfolded, but he's facing it head-on and doing what he can to communicate with his constituents and get things back to normal as soon as possible. If people want to be mad, they should show frustration over the precarious state of Atlanta's unacceptably dilapidated infrastructure rather than the mayor.