Cape Coral has a second boil water area open at 405 SE 30th Terrace, logged on Saturday afternoon but recording the service cut at seven that morning, and the SW 3rd Avenue notice is now into its fourth day

The City of Cape Coral has a second precautionary boil water notice open, covering the area around 405 SE 30th Terrace, after a water main break at the weekend.

The city's record puts the cause as a water main break and the water as drinking water. No rescission has been posted, so the notice is open.

The timing inside that record does not agree with itself. The entry is stamped Saturday at 1.41 p.m., with the service interruption six seconds after it, which is the signature of a record being typed rather than of water going off. The same record then carries separate hour fields reading seven and a.m. The straightforward reading is that service was cut at seven in the morning and the notice reached the city's public map about six and a half hours later, and that gap is the sort of thing that matters to anyone who drank from the tap that Saturday morning. The city publishes nothing that confirms it, so it is offered here as a reading and not as a finding.

It is the second area open at once. The notice at 4612 SW 3rd Avenue, logged the previous Friday morning, has not been rescinded either. That one is now into its fourth day.

What to do inside either area

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

The city publishes a map of the areas under notice rather than a list of streets. If you live near either address and are not sure whether you fall inside a boundary, the map is the thing to check. This desk will not guess at a street list or a household count, because the city has not published either.

How long these usually run

Cape Coral cannot lift a notice on its own judgement. It takes repeated bacteriological samples across the affected area, the Lee County Health Department lab tests them, and the city needs two consecutive days of clear results before it can rescind. In most cases that runs to several days.

The calendar is unhelpful again. The city's published guidance says a break occurring between Thursday evening and Sunday evening can take longer to clear, because the lab does not run on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays. This break landed on a Saturday.

Elsewhere in the region the picture is clear. Collier County Utilities and the City of Fort Myers, which run their own systems and publish their own layers, both showed no active advisory when checked on Monday morning.

No repair time has been published for either area, and the comments field on both of the city's records is empty.