I've seen fire, and I've seen rain

[chuckro]

In the good news department, they lifted our "boil water" advisory late last night, and there was no contamination in the system. Yay! Still a really annnoying sequence of events, which leaves me worried about what we'd do in the event of an actual emergency. (Well, okay, I know what Jethrien and I would do...as soon as we found out about it. What worries me is the ineffectiveness of the media and government at spreading such information.)

Today's other excitement was the fire alarm and subsequent evacuation at work. Oh, sorry, did a say evacuation? I meant evacuations. Because we evacuated the whole building, got the all-clear, came back in, then the alarm sounded for a different floor and we all started out again. They announced it as a false alarm, but that didn't stop the sirens and klaxons from going off periodically for the next hour. Oh, and the AC was off that whole time. Fun morning.

Comments

[deltagrl.livejournal.com]

Was this water advisory for NJ only? I didn't hear about it.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was in Jersey City and Hoboken only--some idiot contractor hit a water main on Saturday afternoon.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

At this point, my bias would be to say it's not an "idiot contractor" -- it's more likely that the poor contractor *tried* to get the water company to tell him where the pipes were, and didn't get any answers. I just finished a project in which I had to get utilites verified, and ran into all kinds of annoyances... The water and sewer company refused to provide maps, citing national security. The electric and phone companies had contracted out their mark-out service to a company that got overwhelmed and started reporting sites as marked out when they hadn't been. After we got everything marked out, but before we could bring out the surveyors, the landscaping contractors showed up and mowed all the spray-paint away, and so on and so forth. Even supposing there were no problems getting the mark-out, utilities only defend their mark-outs to an accuracy of +/- 10 feet. So my reflex is to feel sorry for the contractor, who'll get all sorts of bad press and probably have to pay for the repairs.