Amherst Ohio Water Boil Alerts: How Do They Work?
July 10, 2011
As many of you know, a water boil alert was issued yesterday for the City of Lorain and surrounding communities that use Lorain water. It’s no longer in effect for Amherst, but I got a lot of great questions from residents who wanted to know more about the procedure used for alerting the public about boil alerts
In order to get as much information as I could for everyone, I met with Amherst Mayor David Taylor yesterday afternoon to get facts about how the city deals with boil alerts.
First of all, it’s important to understand that the City of Amherst gets less than 1 percent of its water from the City of Lorain. The vast majority of our water is bought from the City of Elyria.
When a city like Lorain issues a boil alert, they are usually quick to notify appropriate Lorain County officials and officials from surrounding cities that purchase the water.
Additionally, in boil alert situations, the City of Lorain or the appropriate Lorain County officials will put out a news release to local newspapers like the Chronicle and the Morning Journal, as well as other news outlets.
Indeed, many of you might have learned about the boil alert as soon as you checked the news online yesterday morning; I saw breaking news notifications about the boil alert on both the Morning Journal and the Chronicle Telegram yesterday morning.
In addition to the efforts of Lorain County and the City of Lorain to spread the word about the boil alert, many of your Amherst elected officials also worked hard yesterday to notify constituents about the boil alert. I was able to spread the word about the alert to thousands of residents on my Facebook Fan Page and the Amherst Ohio Facebook Group, and other officials immediately sent out hundreds of emails about the situation to their mail list.
In short, some of the best ways to stay informed about future boil alerts is to make a habit of checking the local news and signing up for alerts from local elected officials. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to “Like” my official Facebook Fan Page in order to get immediate updates whenever a situation like this arises in the future.
I hope this information helps! If you have any more questions or suggestions for me, please contact me personally or leave a comment below. Thanks!