ATLANTA — City of Atlanta leaders and Mayor Andre Dickens acknowledged on Tuesday that the city has some major problems with its underground water systems and they plan to address them, but it won’t be fixed anytime soon.
Newly appointed Atlanta Watershed Commissioner James Eyerly says he’s ready to get to work on the city’s plans to improve its aging clean water infrastructure.
“I believe the long-term vison for water in Atlanta is water security,” Eyerly said. “Atlanta knows what its infrastructure issues are.”
Eyerly, the former water director for the City of Houston has 30 years of experience in watershed management. He oversaw Houston’s 15-year, $9 million wastewater federal consent decree.
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“Last summer, two significant water main issues, water main breaks, tested the resilience of our system,” Dickens said.
Now, the City of Atlanta said it is working on a major project to improve its clean water system to prevent it from happening again.
Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Ashli Lincoln got the first look at the plans to replace the city’s aging system, including some pipes over 100 years old.
Water main breaks like the one on Peachtree Road in Buckhead on Jan. 30 have some residents and businesses questioning how reliable the city’s clean water system is.
Channel 2 Action News was there as things came to a head in the summer of 2024 when multiple water lines broke in Northwest Atlanta and Midtown just days apart, knocking out people’s water for days.
“Mayor Dickens has made it very clear that significant improvements need to occur, and it has been my job to make sure that happens,” said Al Wiggins Jr., the Atlanta Department of Watershed Commissioner.
He sat down with Lincoln to explain the improvements the city plans to make to a system that is nearly 3,000 miles long, which is long enough to span from Atlanta to San Francisco.
“Over the past seven months, we have done probably the equivalent of three years’ worth of work,” said Wiggins.
The City created the Atlanta Water Advisory Group after the summer breaks and includes the Army Corps of Engineers, former Mayor Shirley Franklin, and other infrastructure experts.
“This was a problem hundreds of years in the making, and so it’s going to take a couple of decades to fix,” said Peter Aman, Atlanta’s Chief Strategy Officer and a member of the task force.
Aman also said the work will cost billions of dollars.
“This new program will take decades and will involve ripping up streets, you know, of miles-long length. And so, all of that has to be carefully planned,” said Aman.
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“It’s been a struggle for as long as I’ve been here,” said City Council Member Howard Shook, who sits on the Utilities Committee and has decades of water infrastructure knowledge.
Shook said the city has a history of water line mismanagement. He said in the past, contracted companies did not regularly maintain water valves.
“If they haven’t been exercised on a regular basis, in other words, open and closed, then they lock up,” said Shook.
He said that was one reason it took such a long time to turn off the midtown water main break. He added that crews are also relying on outdated maps.
“That’s a challenge now, because we don’t know where they are half the time,” said Shook.
Along with the advisory group, the City has created a command center that will “allow us to centralize operations,” said Wiggins.
It also enhanced its software to help locate the 70,000 valves within the system and installed multiple leak detection devices.
“We’re scheduled to save about 160 million gallons of water annually,” said Wiggins.
He said with these changes, along with the water advisory group, they’re moving towards progress.
“We are proud that we are working together. We have a plan. We’re using our time wisely. We’re working quickly. We’re working smarter, not harder,” said Wiggins.
The task force will also research the cost and how to do the work with minimal disruption to residents and businesses.
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