John Matthews
WMAL.com

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission is defending its decision to allow the public to continue to prepare for a water outage for more than 17 hours after it had successfully averted the crisis.

The utility had warned on Monday that potentially hundreds of thousands of WSSC customers in Prince George’s County would be facing up to five days without water while emergency repairs were made to a 54-inch water main.  Businesses made plans to close, hotels canceled guest reservations, government agencies mobilized to make emergency plans and provide shelter, and residents emptied store shelves of bottled water, preparing for a complete loss of water by noontime Wednesday.

What the WSSC didn’t share – apparently even with Prince George’s County leaders –  was that it had a plan to fix an old valve that would allow the shutdown to be averted.

“We knew over the weekend that this valve was always a possibility, ” WSSC spokesman I.J. Hudson told WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall Thursday. “That was going to be the first thing that we tried to use, but we could not get that valve unstuck and ready to move.  Try after try, and we could not get it to work. So what do you do?  You go to a Plan B.” he added.

That “Plan B” was to warn the public that a shutdown was coming.  That plan never changed, even after WSSC engineers succeeded in closing the repaired valve on Tuesday.

“I think they had it done at about 6:40 in the evening,” Hudson told WMAL. “They had it closed.  That doesn’t mean that you’re 100 percent sure it’s going to hold,” he added.

Hudson says utility officials were afraid that sharing the good news with the public would keep residents from taking the crisis seriously.

“We didn’t want to build up false hope.  We wanted people to take action.  If I tell you ‘there’s a tiny tiny chance we might be able to do something else’, what’s your reaction? ‘Oh, they’re going to fix that, we’re not going to do anything,'” Hudson explained.

So instead, the WSSC sat on its good news until noon on Wednesday, hours after many businesses had closed their doors.

“We did the best that we could with the information we had at the time, and I think we made the right decision,” Hudson told WMAL.

Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker told reporters Wednesday he’s glad the crisis was averted, but he also wants answers.

“I want to see when they first knew about this other option,” said Baker.

Copyright 2013 by WMAL.com.  All Rights Reserved.(PHOTO CREDIT – AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)