Water crisis panicked officials

Text messages show city’s top managers in prolonged panic

It was a dark day for Fort Lauderdale — the day the well almost went dry.

Restaurants, hotels and malls closed. So did the courthouse. Residents, told to buy bottled water or boil it from the tap, ranted. The broken water pipe that sent Fort Lauderdale into crisis mode this past summer also sent city officials into a prolonged panic.

That panic, mixed with shades of humor, is laid bare in a stream of text messages sent by Fort Lauderdale’s top managers during a series of emergency repairs to the city’s ailing water system dating back to July and extending into August.

On July 18 sometime after 1 p.m., City Attorney Alain Boileau asks if employees can leave early to go fetch drinking water for their homes, saying he’s already getting requests and doesn’t want to “start a stampede.”

City Manager Chris Lagerbloom — on a family vacation in London when the crisis struck and forced to return home early — sent a text to Commissioner Ben Sorensen the morning of July 18: “Learning of a massive water pipe break.”

Sorensen texted back quickly: “Oh crap. Where? What does this mean?”

Lagerbloom’s response was ominous: “As a supply line to the water plant, it means we have only a certain number of hours left to get it repaired to keep Five Ash on line. … It was a contractor that hit our line. One of my biggest fears … The risk is we run out of water this morning and people are without for 24-36 hours. We are throwing everything at it that we can.”

An FPL contractor drilled a 6-inch hole into a 42-inch main that supplies water from city wellfields to Fort Lauderdale’s main water plant, Fiveash.

To the rescue: A tree limb

The crippling outage affected not only Fort Lauderdale but water customers in other cities, including all or parts of

Davie, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Port Everglades, Oakland Park, Sea Ranch Lakes, Tamarac and Wilton Manors –— a total of 220,000 customers.

In the end, a tree limb saved the day.

With the clock ticking and desperation growing, crews plugged the hole in the pipe with a log to keep the water from gushing out. The log and pipe were then encased in concrete, buying the city time to make permanent repairs.

“It sounds like all we are doing is putting our finger in the dike,” Mayor Dean Trantalis said in one text. “Maybe that will at least buy us some time.”

During the crisis, workers had trouble finding a key underground valve because its above-ground marker was missing. Crews finally found it using sonar equipment.

“It looks like we found the right valve and have finally isolated the section of pipe,” Deputy City Manager Rob Hernandez said in a text to the mayor and city manager. “It was installed about 47 years ago and was not showing up on any maps. We got it to work but it’s in rough shape … It looks like something out of the titanic wreck.”

Trantalis texted back: “I cannot believe how antiquated our systems are. We really need to engage our infrastructure program into fast forward.”

‘People are going to freak’

Later, Lagerbloom frets over a press eager for answers and an anxious public frustrated by the series of water breaks.

One boil-water order was put into effect on July 19 and lifted two days later for most of Fort Lauderdale and the other cities it serves.

But just four days later, Las Olas Isles was put under another boil order when another main needed emergency repairs.

Water tests kept failing, forcing the city to keep the order in effect from July 25 through Aug. 5.

With frustration building, Public Works Director Paul Berg wrote a frantic text to his top staff on Aug. 1: “No time to delay … We need all hands on deck to solve this ASAP.”

Lagerbloom wrote to Berg that same day, dumbfounded by the prolonged boil-water order on Las Olas Isles.

“The public is going to have a hard time understanding and even I don’t understand,” he wrote. “It doesn’t make sense. How do we pass last night and fail this morning?”

Commissioner Steve Glass man, whose district includes Las O las Isles, checked in frequently with the city manager.

“Unbelievable,” he wrote Aug. 3. “Difficult to comprehend. Something different between evening and morning testing methodologies? People there are going to freak. Please keep me posted.”

The mayor sent Lagerbloom a text asking why the water quality remained contaminated on Las Olas Isles for so long.

“A lot has to do with it being a closed system and the isles being the end of the line,” Lagerbloom said. “If it was a continuous loop system, I’d venture a guess it would be much easier.”

A Herculean task

The mayor replied: “Shoring up our infrastructure is going to be a Herculean task. There seems to be so many layers and nuances entangled underground, like where do we start??”

Lagerbloom texted back: “One bite at a time. Seriously though, we have good master plans, we have committed funding, execution now is key.”

Through it all, they managed to keep a sense of humor.

The tree limb used to plug the hole — the socalled cork — has been preserved at one of the city’s wellfields.

At one point, the public works director jokes about it being put on display, a la “Smithsonian stuff.”

Joe Kenney, then the assistant public works director, sent a text saying: “We have the cork for future use … from Germany.”