Beginning last Friday afternoon, City of Tampa residents got a taste of what it might be like to live in a third world nation. After a 29-minute power outage at The David L. Tippin Water Treatment facility, everyone in the city was told to boil their water. The order that lasted for 37 hours, caused a run on bottled water by residents, and forced some restaurants to close and or be hampered for two nights.
At today's Tampa City Council meeting, every member of the board in attendance took shots at the city's electricity provider (Tampa Electric Company) and the Buckhorn administration, both for the handling of the actual incident and the city's way of informing the public and the city council.
"This was a TECO electrical system failure. This was not a water system failure," Brad Baird, the city's water director, informed the council and the public to begin his presentation. Baird repeated what he told the press in recent days about what went wrong — three different events, involving a squirrel chewing through a pipe, a sagging power line, and a burned-out switch that set off the chaos.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2013.