What, exactly, caused the municipal water system in Atlanta to all but collapse over the past weekend is not yet clear. The crisis started on Friday with a series of water mains bursting in the city’s downtown, causing both flooding in surrounding streets and a dramatic drop in water pressure that left many high-rises and other large buildings — like local hospitals and a city and county jail — without running water. A separate water main burst in midtown, too.
A boil notice was issued across a large swath of Atlanta (the northern and southern sides of the city were largely unaffected) while the city scrambled to stanch the leaks and get the water system back into working order — which was a slow and, according to many residents, under-communicated process.
Mayor Andre Dickens was out of town when the first pipes burst on Friday, and his administration has been criticized for (and quickly apologized for) not communicating adequately with residents. And on social media, another culprit has been identified: the $109-million Cop City development being built just south of the city.
“Most of us in the city of Atlanta have no to low water going on 36 hours with limited communication from the city about what’s going on and next steps. Water is selling out in stores. The mayor sent a city wide text msg just 2 hours ago,” Paris Hatcher, executive director of Black Feminist Future, tweeted over the weekend. “We don’t need cop city we need infrastructure.”
At about 50% Black, Atlanta’s gentrifying downtown is far from being the Blackest neighborhood in the city. But as both the commercial heart of the city and an area that was never historically white like neighborhoods to the north, downtown is at the crux of Atlanta’s long history of segregation — both in terms of who lives where and also who has access to public infrastructure, like municipal water service. There’s a direct line too between the South River watershed, where Cop City construction is already being blamed for increased flooding, and the city’s often lopsided efforts to develop a public water system in the decades following the end of the Civil War.
The first public waterworks in Atlanta drew water from the South River to feed a reservoir, completed in 1875, that sat just a few miles upstream from where the police-training facility is currently being built. The new water system replaced what was literally a two-tiered approach to both drinking water and wastewater that came to define reconstruction-era Atlanta, which had to be almost completely rebuilt after the Civil War.
White neighborhoods were established atop the city’s many hills, while Black communities were confined to lower elevations — creating a phenomenon in which the waste from outhouses and latrines in white neighborhoods (the city didn’t have a sewer system yet) routinely flowed down into the Black communities below them. This not only polluted the streets, but as historian Bartow Elmore described in the essay “Hydrology and Residential Segregation in the Postwar South: An Environmental History of Atlanta, 1865-1895,” the wells, springs, and other drinking-water sources that Black Atlantans relied on.
The South River waterworks ended up being an equalizing force in an unexpected way: since the reservoir sat downstream of the entire city, the water was contaminated by everything that washed away from white and Black neighborhoods alike. That’s when segregationist city planners first turned their attention to the Chattahoochee River, which continues to be the source of Atlanta’s drinking water to this day.
“By locating the new waterworks to the north, city developers could secure fresh water for white urbanites without dealing with the environmental problems that plagued black communities,” Elmore wrote in his 2010 essay, published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly. “No longer would white residents have to drink from a water source supplied by polluted branches that flowed through black neighborhoods.”
Chattahoochee water began to reach downtown Atlanta by 1893, and the whiter neighborhoods that lay both uphill and to the north (for the most part) finally had a modern municipal water system. But the same could not be said for points south of Downtown, where it sometimes took decades longer for water mains to reach Black neighborhoods. According to Elmore, parts of Black Atlanta relied on those same polluted local wells until the 1910s — which is after the 36-inch water mains that burst in Downtown Atlanta this past week were first installed in 1910. The larger, 42-inch mains that also ruptured were installed slightly later, in the 1930s. The city lined all the pipes that comprise the municipal water distribution network with concrete in the 1950s, extending their expected lifetime — but even still, that window has long since passed.
Atlanta is spending money on water infrastructure, at least in theory: in 2018, the city unveiled a $300-million plan to revitalize the system, called the Water Supply Plan. But little has been completed over the last six years: an old quarry was repurposed as a reservoir, and a 10-mile, 10-foot-in-diameter conveyance line is being constructed. But no work has been done on water mains that are the main arteries of the water system, many of which are now at least a century old. On Tuesday, a boil advisory was still in effect for Downtown and parts of East Atlanta, out of what the city said was “an abundance of caution.” The water mains have been repaired, and the affected lines are being repressurized. In a press conference, Al Wiggins, the Atlanta Watershed commissioner was already pointing to the age of the pipes as a potential issue for the ruptures. But as of yet, there doesn’t appear to be any kind of move being made toward larger, more systemic fixes — instead, it’s a return to this status quo.