What's Your Procedure?

On the evening of July 14, there was a power failure at a water filtration plant on the Ottawa River. The next day, the City of Gatineau issued a news release warning residents to boil their drinking water, but not everyone got the message—and several people are none too pleased.

Councillor André Laframboise told the Ottawa Citizen that many of Aylmer’s 42,000 residents drank inadequately purified water because Gatineau failed to properly notify them that they had to boil city drinking water. From the article:

“The city notified people about the need to boil water through a press release and if you didn’t happen to be in the right place at the right time to hear the news or read the paper, you wouldn’t know about the warning,” Laframboise said.

He said the city’s telephone warning system that automatically calls residents when they need to boil possibly contaminated water failed because many people were not at home, do not have telephone answering machines and did not hear the warning. “We have an automated telephone system that called about 1,000 households but not the whole sector.”

The Aylmer advisory was lifted on July 17. While no related injuries or illnesses have been reported, it sounds like the City of Gatineau needs to sit down and rethink its notification strategy. Laframboise suggested that city employees should have distributed printed boil water warnings by hand to households in order to ensure the affected homes and businesses were made aware of the problem.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. Some municipalities, however, have taken a strong preventative role in developing their notification procedures. For example, the Town of Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia has a fairly straightforward communication plan with a simple goal: effectively communicate the issue. It’s available on the Town’s website. It reads:

1. The Town will inform consumers in a manner and frequency acceptable to Nova Scotia Environmental and Labour (NSEL) and the Ministry of Health (MOH).
2. If the Town fails to notify the consumers, NSEL or the MOH will take appropriate steps to notify consumers. The boil water advisory must be effectively communicated to the public. Consideration is to be given to placing the advisory in daily newspapers and in all other print media in the area. Local radio and television stations should be requested to broadcast the advisory on a frequent basis. All methods of Originating communication to the public are to be maintained throughout the duration of the advisory being in effect. In the case of an immediate serious public health threat, other methods of notification, such as door-to-door and installation of signage, may be necessary.

Do you know your municipality’s notification protocol? If the idea of drinking water that hasn’t been properly treated makes you uneasy, familiarize yourself with the City’s official website or call your public works department. Does the communication plan give you confidence?

**Update** One of our Twitter followers commented that there’s no social media noted in Port Hawkesbury’s plan, and that doesn’t inspire his confidence—it’s “very last century,” he said. As an avid social media participant, I agree, but it’s interesting and important to note that many municipalities—large and small—are thinking in this direction. They have Facebook and Twitter accounts, oftentimes linked to their news release feeds. For them, it’s just a matter of indicating this coverage in their official plans. Does your municipality participate in social media?