How Halifax Water communicated major boil-water order leaves 'serious questions to answer,' says councillor

When Halifax Water wanted to get the word out in late January about a boil-water order affecting about 200,000 customers, one of the resources it turned to was the city's emergency notifications platform, hfxALERT.

"While this is a subscription-based system, it is widely used and supports getting the message out," the utility said in a February report issued to regulators.

But at the time of the Jan. 21, 2025, alert, only about 40,000 of the city's roughly 500,000 residents were signed up to the platform.

Just how Halifax Water communicated with residents about the boil-water order was, in part, the subject of two blunt emails a municipal councillor sent to a pair of Halifax Water officials — spokesperson Jeff Myrick and general manager Kenda MacKenzie — on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.

District 16 Coun. Jean St-Amand called the utility's approach "another failure in our critical emergency communications apparatus," and said "there are serious questions to answer here."

CBC News obtained the emails through an access-to-information request. The Bedford-Wentworth councillor highlighted problems, in part, with how Nova Scotia Power notifies the water utility of planned outages and how Halifax Water communicates with residents about service issues.

"I was really trying to get at the essence of what I felt could have been done better and why I was asking the questions that I was asking [was] because it was a reflection of what I was being asked by residents," St-Amand told CBC.

The advisory was put in place after a planned outage by Nova Scotia Power caused an issue at the Pockwock Lake water treatment facility. Water continued to be treated, but lacked chlorine disinfection. While the interruption was originally reported as allowing unchlorinated water to enter the system for about 30 minutes, the report filed with regulators said it was actually 66 minutes.

It was the second time in less than a year that a widespread boil-water order was in place for a swath of the Halifax Regional Municipality. The first incident, on Canada Day, ended up lasting 40 hours and also affected customers who get their water from the Pockwock facility.

Pockwock serves about half of Halifax Water's customers

Pockwock is the largest treatment facility for Halifax Water, offering up water to about half of its customers.

The January boil-water order caused disruptions throughout the municipality, prompting some businesses to close and forcing some surgeries to be rescheduled.

The order also attracted scathing criticism from the premier.

"This is an awful situation, a complete embarrassment," Tim Houston told CTV News. "Shame on Halifax Water."

Outage notifications

If it wasn't for an off-duty Halifax Water employee, the utility may not have learned about the planned Nova Scotia Power outage before the power went out.

While residents such as St-Amand received automated phone messages from Nova Scotia Power about the planned outage, which was set to happen at 10:30 p.m. AT on Monday, Jan. 20, the autodial number on file for Halifax Water's Pockwock facility was inactive.

Around 8:35 p.m., an off-duty Halifax Water employee saw a social media post about the planned outage and texted an on-duty operator asking if they knew about it. The on-duty staffer then began taking steps to prepare.

In one of St-Amand's emails to MacKenzie and Myrick, he wondered what was required of Nova Scotia Power for notifying Halifax Water about outages.

MacKenzie told CBC that some of the phone numbers Nova Scotia Power had on hand were out of date or weren't being answered by the appropriate staff members. As a result of the January incident, she said, Nova Scotia Power now calls a 24-hour number at Halifax Water to ensure direct contact with staff.

Notifying residents

While the city has its own emergency notifications platform — hfxALERT — users must sign up to receive the alerts, which can come via text message, email or an app notification.

Under the province's emergency alert system, messages are automatically sent to people's cellphones — they do not have to sign up to receive them. Both the provincial system and hfxALERT can geographically target people in specific areas.

In one of St-Amand's emails, he said residents were asking about the lack of a region-wide emergency alert.

Social media flaws

"Social media is completely inadequate to the task, especially as residents may go about their morning routine, using this now at-risk water, without having seen anything from Halifax Water until after the fact, if at all," wrote St-Amand on Jan. 21.

As of mid-May, Halifax Water had about 5,000 followers on Facebook and about 8,200 on X (formerly Twitter).

MacKenzie told CBC the threshold for using the provincial alert system is when there is an imminent threat to life.

During the Canada Day boil-water order, alerts were issued through the hfxALERT and provincial systems.

To get the word out about the boil-water order on the morning of Jan. 21, Halifax Water relied on its social media channels, public service notices it sent to media outlets and interviews with them, and emails sent to area councillors. An hfxALERT was issued at 6:45 a.m.

Alert system has 'pitifully low' number of subscribers, says St-Amand

On that day, there were 40,141 hfxALERT subscribers, which St-Amand told CBC is "pitifully low." Today, the number of subscribers is just under 44,500.

MacKenzie said she wasn't aware how few people were signed up for the service in January.

"I do know that HRM is continuing, especially through [its] recent Emergency [Preparedness] Week, to promote sign-up to the Halifax alert and hopes to get more people subscribing to that," she said.

MacKenzie said the utility did issue a non-intrusive alert through the provincial system during the January boil-water order. However, these alerts only show up for users of The Weather Network app.

In one of St-Amand's emails, he said social media should be used as a supplement — and not a replacement — for communicating with residents.

"I had to call my mother this morning to warn her about the boil advisory this morning, even though she IS on social media," he wrote. "The Mass Casualty Commission blasted police for relying upon social media for emergency message distribution because the algorithm drastically impacts visibility."

Utility looking at more ways to contact customers in emergencies

St-Amand also wondered why Halifax Water wouldn't be able to use the information it already had on hand from customers — such as phone numbers and addresses — as a means of notifying them.

MacKenzie said that because of privacy laws, Halifax Water cannot use customers' contact information for purposes other than billing due to the consent the utility obtained. She said Halifax Water is looking into other ways to contact customers during emergencies.

Asked to comment on St-Amand's criticisms, MacKenzie said there is room for the utility to improve how it communicates with residents.

"We're taking that feedback and that input to try and explore different mechanisms or different avenues that we can build off of … it's still a work in progress, but we are taking all that feedback into consideration," she said.

On Monday, municipal staff told councillors Halifax Water now has the ability to send its own intrusive provincial alerts without waiting for HRM.

"They now have a policy based on feedback received from those two previous [boil-water] incidents, and I think that's pretty well established right now," Bill Moore, Halifax's commissioner of public safety, said during an executive committee meeting.

CAO Cathie O'Toole also said the provincial government is working to create Nova Scotia-wide recommendations for local governments and utilities about how and when alerts are issued for similar boil-water incidents.