Baltimore City council members bemoaned how the city’s department of public works leadership handled a water quality crisis that plagued West Baltimore Labor Day weekend during an oversight hearing on Thursday. The Department of Public Works, led by Jason Mitchell, was criticized for lack of transparency and failure to communicate about E. coli contamination to residents in affected neighborhoods. Mitchell took the reins of DPW about a year ago, and earns a $245,000 salary.
Thousands of residents were told to boil their water for several days in early September and even more in Baltimore County boiled tap water out of concern.
“Every city and county faces challenges and the reason we’re here today is not because we experienced the contamination of our water system, because that can happen anywhere. Why we’re here is because of the way it was handled,” said Isaac Schleifer, who represents District 5 and chairs the rules and legislative oversight committee.
The most critical period of a crisis is the first 24 hours, Schleifer said.
“Frankly, I’m disgusted how those first 24 hours was handled,” he said.
When the city did disclose the water quality issues to the public, it wasn’t a multifaceted social media campaign but just some tweets on Twitter which diminished the effect, he said. That left both the public and members of the news media searching for answers to basic questions.
“The media and the public was left in the dark in those most critical hours Monday, when parents were mixing their baby’s formula with powder that was possibly mixed with contaminated water,” he said.
Seniors could have been taking their morning medicine with water contaminated with E. coli, which could make them sick, he said.
In response, Department of Public Works director Mitchell said that the department met all the regulatory requirements but there’s always room for improvement.
“We recognize the frustration expressed by key stakeholders and valued customers and we are in the process of creating new protocols to ensure swift resolution to issues as they arise and to improve communications to our public,” Mitchell said.
The DPW director shared a timeline of events that the first water sample which showed E. coli contamination was collected and confirmed on Friday at a local fire station but the general public wasn’t informed until Monday morning. Even so, the department posted information on Twitter, the Nextdoor neighborhood website and knocked on doors. Some nursing homes were contacted directly about the contamination around 10 p.m. on Sunday night.
Mitchell defended his actions saying the department was required to inform the Maryland Department of the Environment first before the public but conceded that the emergency response communication strategy needed work.
“There was a lot of lessons learned,” Mitchell said.
Council member Eric Costello, who represents District 11 which included some neighborhoods in the boil notice advisory area, complained that he was “extremely disappointed” with the low resolution map sent to residents with boundaries of the tap water contamination. Later, an interactive map was shared.
Council member Schliefer said he’s not convinced that the department will be more transparent in the future.
“I don’t think you guys learned any lessons and I say this because we’ve had this conversation many times on previous hearings about when you’re going ahead and putting a piece of information out in one place, it doesn’t cost you anymore to put it on all those platforms,” he said.
Mitchell said DPW is working on upgrading their communications policies and they’ve also hired a new communications employee who will begin in about a month. But council member Schleifer said that’s too long to wait.
“In the meantime you could literally take a high school kid from any Baltimore City Public High School to run the social media for you and put out the information that you approve,” Schleifer said.
