FORT MYERS, FLA — The city of Fort Myers is still under a city wide boil alert as of Monday night, This is ongoing since Saturday when a water main broke and caused ares to lose or have low water pressure.
This city-wide boil water notice is affecting more than 92,000 people and tonight when I asked the city of Fort Myers utilities director when it could be lifted... I was told not until the tests come back - and many of those tests aren't scheduled to come back until Tuesday morning or afternoon so they can not give a definitive answer tonight on when exactly the notice will be lifted.
City of Fort Myers Utilities Director Richard Moulton says crews spent more than 18 hours identifying the break and getting it fixed, "It’s a larger line so the scope of the impact is larger than it would be a line that’s a 6 inch line but the size of the line is what determines that not necessarily the break or not."
And from what we're being told any break can affect the city because it's a looped system so if you look at a circle any portion of the circle that breaks effects the rest of the circle.
So we get it - the water main broke but it's placed an entire city on a boil water notice so what's being done to possibly prevent this from happening again or what solutions are in place for the future?
"It’s very hard to predict whether we’ll have another crack in a pipe on some street in the City of Fort Myers but we have done is that we have a very robust capital improvement budget for the utilities. Over the next five years almost $420 million and quite a bit of that investment is a new infrastructure, new water plants, wells, new pipelines, new sewers all of that is in an effort to rejuvenate any of our older lines both gravity sewer lines and waterlines to make sure we minimize those areas that are susceptible to this type of event," says Moulton.
At the earliest the lift would be Tuesday afternoon but again that is not concrete yet because the city is still waiting on test results. The city of Fort Myers wants residents and businesses to know that they are working aggressively to get the boil water notice lifted.
