Only about 60% of the nearly 900 businesses that started applications to receive recovery funds from the city of Atlanta following the catastrophic water outage in early June that left some residents without water for five days have completed those applications, Invest Atlanta said.
Only 535 applications were submitted to the city, said Eloisa Klementich, Invest Atlanta’s president and CEO, providing an update on the city’s progress in addressing systemic water infrastructure problems.
“We are prioritizing businesses like nail salons, hair salons, day cares and restaurants where water is an operational necessity,” she said. “While many were affected, some people may have had the option to continue work from home during that time.”
Klementich stood before Atlanta City Council members last week at a special called meeting to discuss takeaways from two major water main breaks, the initial at Joseph E. Boone Boulevard and J.P. Brawley Drive in Vine City and the latter at West Peachtree and 11th streets in Midtown. Council members in attendance were Antonio Lewis, Alex Wan, Byron Amos, Mary Norwood, Matt Westmoreland, and Andrea L. Boone.
The outages resulted in Atlanta City Mayor Andre Dickens, who received fierce criticism for his delayed response, issuing a state of emergency as hundreds of thousands of Atlantans were restricted under a boil water advisory.
The Small Business Recovery Fund was the culmination of a city ordinance that provided Invest Atlanta with $5 million to assist small businesses that were negatively impacted by the June water crisis. Eligible businesses included those with addresses inside the city’s boil water advisory lines, those who held active city of Atlanta business licenses, were registered with the secretary of state’s office, and could provide a proof of revenue between May 13 and June 11.
The award amount will be determined by a set of criteria that includes overall business closures and revenue brackets. Applications for the grant closed July 8.
Devin Barrington-Ward, a community activist who organized around the water crisis, said the grant’s rollout was troubling because the city didn’t appear to be moving with urgency.
“In the future, we know that there’s a potential for this to happen again,” said Ward, who founded the Black Futurist Group, a public policy advocacy group focused on social justice. “So what preparation is going to be done in advance to make sure that we can respond rapidly?”
Ward also said there are affected businesses that still have unpaid wages owed to their employees, including some that were already faced with revenue loss due to ongoing capital projects like the Cascade Road improvement project.
Al Wiggins, Department of Watershed Management commissioner, detailed to council members what exactly went wrong. Both water main breaks resulted in a longer repair time and wider outage net than most scenarios the department deals with, he said.
“Three major transmission lines intersect right at Boone and Brawley, so that means we had to extend disconnection to several other lines as we repaired,” Wiggins explained. “And at West Peachtree, the main break was right over the valve we needed to terminate services, so we had to move further down to repair the problem.”
The Atlanta Department of Watershed Management services nearly 1.2 million people daily and has over 4,000 miles of sewer and drinking lines.
Water infrastructure is not a new issue for Atlanta, and its leaders are having to think holistically about addressing it, said Peter Aman, the city’s chief strategy officer.
“There are pipes out there that are 100 years old — there are ones that are even older than that in some cases,” Aman said. “This is a problem a long time in the making.”
