The comments by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young concerning their near total failure to supply running water to residents this winter demand a rebuttal ("Frustration mounts as city water outage continue," March 6).
Their cavalier, callous and near-criminal response to 6,000 citizens being without running water is that the city government performed well. I question if that would be their viewpoint if they had gone without running water at their residences for two weeks.
After five days with no water and melting snow to flush toilets, I hired a plumber to fix my problem. Then after my situation was cleared up at my personal expense, three different crews over five days came by the residence to fix the now non-existent problem, wasting both time and money.
The mayor and City Council botched their response, and so far, I haven't heard a single public official admit that they learned anything during this crisis that would be helpful the next time it occurs. They could start by informing people of what is going on and what to expect.
BGE has a map of outages on its website. Is it too much to expect that Baltimore could note water main breakages and the estimated repair time? Could the Department of Public Works not post a listing of complainants, in chronological order, noting the time the call was received? Is it so hard to state how many problems they are fixing an hour allowing people to gauge when they will be served? Is it hard to update their master complaint list so that previously served citizens don't get unneeded visits when others are suffering?
Is it so hard to staff and supply a few locations where people on the complaint list could go to collect free bottled water while they wait for service?
I have heard no talk about reimbursing people for plumbing costs or the purchase of bottles water. It would be a positive gesture for Mayor Rawlings-Blake and Council President Young to propose some measures to see that this doesn't happen again. Better by far than their insulting claims that they did the best they could.
Robert Bedard, Baltimore