Community reacts to water outage, precautionary boil water notice

A community reacts to the water outage and precautionary boil water notice for areas east of I-75 in Fort Myers.

People have been dealing with little to no water throughout the day.

Now, the water main breaks have been fixed and the city is doing bacteriological testing.

The notice will be in place until at least Tuesday and that’s best case scenario.

The city said they are conducting tests to make sure the water is not contaminated with bacteria and that means the water has to be tested multiple times over a period of two days.

The two water main breaks happened at Bridgetown at the plantation but the impact goes a lot further.

“Boil water, boil water, boil water, it’s disgusting,” Maria Bernardini, a Fort Myers resident said, “Every three or four months there’s a water problem here.”

Utilities Director Richard Moulton said Bernardini isn’t wrong.

“Over the last three, four years, we’ve had a number of breaks in this portion of our city,” Moulton said.

He said they will look at what caused the breaks and determine if the infrastructure needs to be revisited.

“We’re trying to come up with an underlying theme, every, every time we have a break, we look at it. If there is a nexus between all of the breaks, we pursue it with forensic testing,” Moulton said.

But the constant breaks to the infrastructure doesn’t just affect homeowners.

Marissa Garcia came with her little sister hoping to grab some drinks for a ‘Sunday Funday’ when she saw the sign.

“No Starbucks. We wanted to get us some frappes my sister likes what is it the pinkity drinkity… I’m so upset. Like terribly upset. Hopefully, it gets resolved and we can come back tomorrow.”

Unfortunately for Garcia Starbucks is still closed and the water advisory is still in place.

Moulton said even though this area does experience quite a bit of issue the infrastructure is relatively new, it was put in place in 2004.

Once the city conducts tests if bacteria is found the notice will stay. And people here east of 75 will have to keep boiling water.