Cape Coral logged a third active boil water area on Friday afternoon, an 83 acre shape in the southeast that is the largest of the three now standing, and it went up hours after the city cleared three older notices

The City of Cape Coral logged a third active precautionary boil water area on Friday afternoon, and it is the largest of the three now standing.

The city's live boil water layer, the one its own utilities page directs residents to, carries three areas with no rescission date against them. All three follow water main breaks, and all three are recorded against drinking water.

The newest was stamped at 3.10 on Friday afternoon and is tied to a break at 4116 SE 19th Place. Its polygon covers about 83 acres, roughly twice the size of the area logged the day before.

That older area, stamped at 12.11 on Thursday afternoon, sits around a break at 4240 SE 20th Place and covers about 42 acres. The two shapes are separate records, but they span the same narrow band of latitude and meet along their edges in the south east of the city. A household in that pocket may fall inside either one.

The third and smallest area, under nine acres, was stamped at 7.28 on Friday morning around a break at 1809 SE 9th Terrace, well to the north of the other two.

Because the shapes are drawn rather than described by street, the map is the only reliable way to tell whether a given address is inside one. The city links to it from its Boil Water page.

A precautionary notice is not a finding that the water is contaminated. The city's standing guidance is that these notices are required whenever a main break drops pressure below 20 psi, and it asks affected customers to bring water to a rolling boil for one minute before drinking it, cooking with it, making ice, rinsing food, preparing baby bottles or brushing teeth, or to use bottled water instead. Showering and laundry are not restricted.

Clearance is not quick. The city says the notice stands until two consecutive days of clear laboratory results come back from the Lee County Health Department, and that a break late in the week can take longer because the lab does not run on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays. Friday afternoon is that case.

The same record shows the city working through the backlog. Three notices were rescinded early on Friday morning, within thirteen minutes of one another: one on Santa Barbara Boulevard South from Wednesday, one on Southeast Santa Barbara Place from Tuesday, and one on Southeast 39th Terrace that had been standing since 4 August, seventeen days.

Two further notices on Hancock Bridge Parkway were lifted on Wednesday, and one on Southeast 5th Avenue on Thursday morning.

The city publishes no narrative notice alongside these records and named no cause beyond a main break for any of the three active areas. Nothing here was reported by an outlet. It was read from the city's own map service, which is what the public map draws from.