Fort Lauderdale water crises could have been averted
FORT LAUDERDALE — The company that drilled a hole in a Fort Lauderdale water line — causing a day of havoc for tens of thousands of Broward County residents — apparently had information it needed to avoid the calamity, police say.
The contractor, Florida Communication Concepts, had documentation from an outside service about the location of underground lines, according to a police report.
City officials are investigating how the workers still managed to hit a line, a blunder that forced most of the city to shut down Thursday and left thousands of people without water.
Despite the great public interest, however, the city refused Friday to discuss what went wrong, how the process should have worked, fines the contractor may face, laws that may have been broken or the possibility of criminal charges.
“There’s a lot of factfinding, a lot of information that needs to be amassed,” spokesman Chaz Adams said. “The city attorney is looking into what transpired to get all the facts.”
Mayor Dean Trantalis said the city hasn’t calculated its costs yet. As far as assessing blame, he said the city is still working on it.
“Honestly, we’re not there yet,” he said. “We need to do some factual investigating.”
The good news was that a temporary patch installed Thursday was holding, allowing water to flow and toilets to flush and several hundred thousand residents to get on with their lives. A boil water order remains in effect at least until sometime Sunday.
“It’s working just fine. It’s holding up,” Deputy City Manager Rob Hernandez said of the fix.
Adams said the next step will be for city crews and the city’s contractor to ensure that valves controlling the flow of water are working properly. After that, work will begin on redirecting the water so a contractor hired by the city can replace the damaged pipe and complete the permanent repair, officials said. The city doesn’t expect water service to be interrupted during the repairs.
Workers mistakingly bored a 6-inch hole in the 42-inch pipe while drilling underground Wednesday to repair electrical lines. The location of the water main break was in the 2500 block of Northwest 55th Court, just off the runways at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. suggest solutions to end the crisis. The 38-member group is expected to finish its report by November.
Demings underlined the shortage of available affordable homes in Orange County in his proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
“The plan is to allocate $6 million over the next four years for the ‘Housing for All’ initiative,” he said.
The county’s financial commitment could grow, depending on the availability of funds and the task force’s recommendations.
“The ultimate goal is to provide practical and lasting solutions to the crisis,” he said.
The mayor’s budget pledge is in addition to $10 million the county gets annually from the federal and state governments to fund housing-assistance programs.
The former Hawthorne Village was an 84-unit complex built in 1982 with $3 million provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Office. The units were billed the units as low-cost,
good-quality housing for farm workers who labored in muck fields picking carrots, celery and tomatoes. But six months after it opened, the roofs sprung leaks.
Later inspections uncovered other construction flaws, which caused widespread mold and decay. By early 2000, the apartments, many of which lacked air conditioning, were so infested with cockroaches that worried mothers stuffed cotton balls in their sleeping babies’ ears to keep bugs from crawling in.
Orange County set aside $1.9 million for a rehab in 2002, then transferred the property to Homes in Partnership, a nonprofit homebuilding group that had renovated or built more than 3,500 homes in Central Florida since its founding in 1975 in Apopka.
The group pledged to fix up the complex. But inspectors concluded it would be wiser to spend money on demolition instead of renovation.