Large swaths of metro Atlanta are without public water service due to at least two burst water mains within the city. Hospitals are declining incoming patients and diverting them to other facilities outside the affected areas. It will be interesting to hear the analysis from local engineers on the root cause.

* century-plus old infrastructure not replaced in time?
* some underlying geologic shift that undermined support for sections of these mains?
* damage from construction?

For two breaks to cause such a large outage, one has to assume the mains are near the core of the system and indescribably large. That would seem to make it much more difficult to fix them quickly.

I guess the failure could have been worse. It could have been further into summer with more demand on remaining capacity.


WTH