Lee County lifted the boil water notice on Dorchester Street in the Villas at 9.23 on Sunday morning, forty eight hours after the main broke, and left the Chandler Avenue notice a few streets away open
Stock photo
Lee County Utilities has lifted one of the two boil water notices it had been carrying in the Villas since Friday, and left the other one open.
The county's water map service was queried directly at about 12.55 on Sunday afternoon. It returns the same six records it held this morning. Five now carry a lift date. One does not.
The one that changed is the Dorchester Street notice. It covers 8921 through 8949 Dorchester Street, it went up after what the county describes in its own words as a two inch main break at 8954 Dorchester Street on Friday morning, and the county rescinded it at 9.23 on Sunday morning. That is 47.9 hours after the break, so almost exactly forty eight hours.
Two fields on the record say the same thing. The rescinded date is filled in, and the county has changed the record's type code from its emergency shut down value to its rescinded value. The layer's own edit history shows that this was the most recent change made to the whole layer.
The one that did not change is the Chandler Avenue notice. It covers 2418 through 2457 Chandler Avenue, and it followed a four inch main break stamped the same Friday morning, 9.30 a.m., as the Dorchester one.
That record has no rescinded date. It is still carried as an emergency shut down. And it has not been edited at any point since it was created at 11.46 on Friday morning, which means the county was in this layer on Sunday morning to lift the notice a few streets away and left this one exactly as it was.
As of about 1 p.m. on Sunday it has been open 51.5 hours. The county's own note on every record on this layer says a boil water event typically lasts 24 to 48 hours but can be longer and may last several days, and its notices page says a notice stays in effect until bacteriological testing confirms the water is safe, which it says typically takes 48 to 72 hours. Both of these figures sit inside that window.
Nothing here says the water on Chandler Avenue is unsafe. A precautionary notice is issued when pressure in a main drops below 20 psi, and it goes out to protect people whether or not contamination has been found. No test result for either address has been published by anyone.
One correction to this site's earlier item, and one caution withdrawn.
The item published at 6.25 this morning gave the elapsed time on both notices as about 69 hours. That was wrong by roughly a day. Friday 9.30 a.m. to Sunday 6.25 a.m. is about 45 hours. The earlier item has been corrected. The point it was making, that the notices were inside the county's own stated window rather than past it, still holds.
This desk has also said three times, on August 11, on August 14 and again this morning, that the county does not publish what its boil water type codes mean. That was wrong. The expansion is published, in the map layer's own field metadata rather than on any page. The county gives ESD as Emergency Shut Down Precautionary Boil Water Notice, SSD as Scheduled Shut Down Precautionary Boil Water Notice, and BWR as Boil Water Rescinded. Those are the county's words, and they are what makes the type flip on the Dorchester record readable as a second confirmation of the lift rather than as an unexplained code change.
Collier County and the City of Fort Myers run their own separate water systems and their own separate maps. Both were checked on this run and neither has an active advisory. The City of Cape Coral is a fourth separate system, and the map this site used until yesterday has been removed from the city's server, so no Cape Coral figure is given here in either direction.
