Boil water advisory issued for parts of Atlanta

of Atlanta in South Fulton County are under a boil water advisory. A power outage at the Hemp Hill High Service Pump Station triggered the temporary loss of pressure in the drinking water system. And now a number of neighborhoods in downtown Atlanta, as well as in South Fulton, are under this boil water advisory till tomorrow morning. Now, as you can imagine, it's caused a lot of problems for homeowners and businesses as they try to get water to drink and use. Fox 5's Morse Diggs joins us live. And Morse, this has been very difficult for people. Now, here's the question I think that's foremost on the minds of our viewers. That is this. As I'm speaking to you right now, is the Atlanta water safe? Well, they have samples out, and they have samples in the lab. They went around town where these areas were affected, took those samples. The lab will have to determine whether bacteria got in there before the pumps got restarted. Now, the outage affects up to 10,000 property owners. Did you heed the warning to boil your water for thousands getting up this morning and turning on taps brought an unwelcome surprise? The flow was slow, so slow that at the Coca-Cola company, management decided they couldn't maintain normal sanitary conditions and told office workers to leave and do what work they could from home. When Atlanta water has a hiccup, properties for miles around can be affected, including the Piedmont Hospital. You just couldn't flush the toilet. My dad had to wait a little while for him to go to the restroom, but past that, they've been pretty good on getting him what he needed. Well, they brought him some bottled water. It's just an inconvenience where you can't go wash your hands or whatever when you need to. Now, I asked the Atlanta Water Commissioner, Ms. Powell, about redundancy. The city has got some auxiliary tanks around town to provide pressurized water, but they don't have one for downtown. In fact, they are doing that right now. There's a project in the design phase and they're going to put an extra tank downtown. So if something like this happens, there is a way to have a backup. The last time this happened here in this way was about a year ago. Now one of you I talked to earlier today said, wait a minute, I didn't get a warning. Well they can't give you a warning the night before for a power interruption. So what the commissioner wants you to do is go to the website of the Atlanta Water Department and on there they have some information that you can put in to get updates directly from the city. Reporting live from northwest Atlanta, I'm Morse Diggs, Fox 5 News.