Cape Coral opened a third boil water area on Monday morning, at 608 SE 1st Avenue, and this time the city's own record puts the break and the log entry seventeen seconds apart rather than hours

The City of Cape Coral opened a third precautionary boil water area late on Monday morning, covering the ground around 608 SE 1st Avenue after a water main break.

The city's record gives the cause as a water main break and the water as drinking water. There is no rescission on it, so the notice is open.

The timing on this one is clean, which is worth saying because the last one was not. The break is stamped at 11.22 and five seconds, the service interruption seven seconds after that, and the record was created seventeen seconds after the break. The separate hour fields in the same record read eleven and a.m., and they agree with those stamps. That is what a break being logged as it happens looks like. The record this desk covered earlier today, for 405 SE 30th Terrace, does not read that way: it is stamped Saturday at 1.41 in the afternoon while its own hour fields say seven in the morning.

Three areas open at once

Neither of the older notices has been rescinded.

The area around 4612 SW 3rd Avenue was logged on Friday morning at 10.21 and is now into its fourth day. The area around 405 SE 30th Terrace was logged on Saturday afternoon and is into its third. With Monday's addition the city has three open at the same time.

Elsewhere in the region there is nothing. Collier County Utilities and the City of Fort Myers run their own systems and publish their own layers, and both were queried on Monday and returned no active advisory at all.

What to do inside any of the three areas

Bring tap water to a rolling boil for one minute before drinking it, cooking with it, washing hands, making ice, preparing drinks or baby bottles, rinsing food, brushing teeth or washing dishes, or use bottled water instead. The city's guidance is that the precaution mainly applies to water that is ingested, and that taking a shower or doing laundry is not restricted by it.

The city is also direct about what a notice does and does not mean. Its published answer to whether the water is unsafe is no. State Department of Health guidelines require a precautionary notice whenever a main break drops pressure below 20 pounds per square inch, and that requirement is triggered by the pressure, not by any finding about the water.

How long this one should run

Cape Coral cannot lift a notice on its own judgement. The city takes repeated bacteriological samples across the affected area, the Lee County Health Department tests them, and the city needs two consecutive days of clear results before it can issue a rescission. Its published answer for how long that takes is that in most cases it runs to several days.

Where the two older notices have been fighting the calendar, this one is not. The city says a break occurring from Thursday evening through Sunday evening can take even longer to clear, because the lab is closed on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The SW 3rd Avenue break landed on a Friday and the SE 30th Terrace break on a Saturday. This one landed on a Monday morning, at the front of a full lab week.

No repair time has been published for any of the three areas, and the comments field on all three of the city's records is empty. The city publishes a map of the areas under notice rather than a list of streets, so anyone near one of the three addresses who is unsure whether they fall inside a boundary should check the map. This desk will not guess at a street list or a household count, because the city has not published either.