Recently the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published results of an interesting study of a water outage caused by frozen water lines in two Alabama towns in January 2010. The towns, which were not identified, had a combined population of 18,000.
Strangely, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) was not aware of the outage for several days when restaurants began to run out of water and a resident complained. Later a ADPH nurse found a school operating without water. At that time bulk water in tankers was delivered by the National Guard to one community and five truckloads of bottled water was delivered to the other community and boil alerts were announced in both locations.
The following month the ADPH and CDC conducted a survey of affected households to ascertain the extent of the emergency and its impact on public health. The details of the survey can be found here.
In summary, the survey covered 470 affected and unaffected households. Of this based 23% (108) households experienced water line breaks as a result of the freeze. It was determined that 45% of the households had water stored for an emergency but less than 10% had more than 5 gallons of stored water.
While 90% of the households in one community had heard about the “Boil Alert” almost half of the households heard about it at the start of the advisory and 30% reported drinking unboiled tap water. In the other community 40% heard about the boil advisory from a friend or relative rather than from the official announcements.
After interviews with household representatives the CDC reported that a statistically higher prevalence of acute gastrointestinal illness among residents who lost both water service and reduced pressure for more than 7 days vs. those who experience the outage for less than 7 days.
The study showed that consumers, communities, water utilities and institutions were not adequately prepared for a water emergency. This result paralleled studies of outages in other areas.
The message is clear: Don’t rely on Big Brother to get it right and do it right. The responsibility of taking care of our family in an emergency lies with each of us. Preparation for an emergency is essential, especially preparation for water in an emergency is critically important as we can only live for a few days without water. That’s why my recommendation is to keep multiple 5-gallon bottles of distilled water in reserve at your home and office AND supplement that with a water distiller. A water distiller can provide you with pure, bio-secure water in normal time and in the event of an emergency.
