Harmony's Water

As many Harmony residents already know, our water is not the best. And as of
now it is unsafe to drink. What we also know is that Toho Water Authority
has been struggling for years in their efforts to fix it. Until now I have
been impressed with the seriousness of their efforts.

As I was driving my son to school this morning I asked "Robin, in this day
and age, how would you expect a company entrusted with the public health of
at least a thousand people to keep us informed about a public health issue
like last night's broken water main in Harmony?" He responded "I guess I
would expect to see something about it on their website." I said "Good. We
have that. Now considering the importance of the problem, at a minimum how
often would you expect them to update their website with current water
status information?" Robin said "At least hourly."

FYI, Robin is 15 years old.

Here's Toho Water's initial public announcement to Harmony residents about
the "boil water" warning at 9pm last night:

http://www.webcitation.org/5xrjN5BoQ

And here's what it looks like today:

http://www.webcitation.org/5xsHaDBP0

As you can see, while the warning was finally updated today, the original
announcement wasn't updated for more than 12 hours. This means that we had
no idea until after most of us went to work this morning whether or not we
should continue boiling our water. Since no one saw any changes on the
website in all that time, it would have been easy for folks to assume that
Toho had simply not bothered to update their website and all was well.

Well, all wasn't well.

And to add insult to injury, my wife told me that the one and only phone
call about this important health alert that we received from Toho Water was
at about 9:30 this morning, again more than 12 hours after the problem was
first announced on the Toho website. So anyone who was not privy to the
email blasts in Harmony or who happened to miss the news last night may have
been clueless about boiling their water first thing this morning. Who knows
how many Harmony residents used potentially contaminated water to fill their
water bottles this morning.

If you looked closely at the current "boil water" status, you may have
noticed that Toho Water removed the "Update:" time from their update. So now
they are providing Harmony residents with even less information.

This is a clear sign of unprofessionalism, IMHO. This makes me wonder what
else may be going on with Toho Water that perhaps we are unaware of.