Disruption to water in Ennis

Zeek12

A quick question....and a bit of a bugbear for me! Why can't Ennis Town Council announce/highlight water disruptions on their website in a timely manner? Much of the Quin Road area was without water for between 2 and 3 hours this morning and there was nothing about it on the website. This has happened on a few occasions now.
I noticed later on they put something up online....after our water had come back:rolleyes:

I know it wasn't a planned cut-off, but it would still be useful to put a quick announcement online so at least residents know how long they should expect to be without water. It probably got a mention on Clare FM at some point, but not everyone can hang around listening to the radio all morning!!

Anyway....end of rant. Always helps to let off a bit of steam:)

Mr. G

Always good! An email list would be a good idea.

http://www.clarecoco.ie/water-waste-environment/news/disruption-to-water-supply-on-the-quin-road-ennis.html

Zeek12

Not even looking for an e-mail list.
An announcement - just like the one on their website now - would have been fine this morning. Trouble is that didn't go online until after the water came back! So what was the point really?

Mr. G

I suppose a water mains burst is something that the council didn't plan! Very annoying I know.

Zeek12

Yeah. I can totally understand that.

But surely it would only take a couple of minutes to just post a short announcement online; just to keep people informed. Seems like the sensible thing to do.

Clareman

It may seem like a simple thing, but I'm sure there are a lot of hoops to go through, 1 department to ring another to get another to do something, chances are the web updater may not even be in Clare and might need a ticket logged with an SLA to be updated. AFAIK the councils have a switch board that you can ring to get updates for pr report any outages.

Mr. G

Fair point. At least you can drink the water now. Remember there was something in the water a few years ago?

Zeek12

Clareman wrote: »

It may seem like a simple thing, but I'm sure there are a lot of hoops to go through, 1 department to ring another to get another to do something, chances are the web updater may not even be in Clare and might need a ticket logged with an SLA to be updated. AFAIK the councils have a switch board that you can ring to get updates for pr report any outages.

Couldn't get through to the switchboard this morning. Tried it twice; it put me on hold for a few minutes and then just cut me off both times!! That didn't help my mood I can tell you:eek: At that stage I just gave up!

I hadn't thought about the web updater. That's a fair point I guess.
But there must be a way to send real-time updates. It seems really outdated to rely on the possibility that it might just get a mention on local radio.

I wonder do the council use Twitter?

Mr. G

They have a twitter account, no tweets.

https://twitter.com/ClareCoCo

Clareman

Twitter would be perfect, but don't forget that this would involve having someone to update it, that would either involve training or hiring someone, as they are under tight budget constraints I would imagine that this would be an issue.

It's also very important to remember that to get anything changed in public service/sector can be difficult and will need multiple approval paths, what seems simple to us will need to go through an awful lot of meetings to be approved.

Zeek12

Mr. G wrote: »

They have a twitter account, no tweets.

https://twitter.com/ClareCoCo

Haha. Should I be surprised?

Well that gave me a good laugh at least. Makes up for the frustration and annoyance from earlier:)

Clareman

Mr. G wrote: »

They have a twitter account, no tweets.

https://twitter.com/ClareCoCo

That's County, the outage today was in Ennis

Clareman

Found the town one https://twitter.com/EnnisTC

Looks like just a placeholder account to me, no tweets yet.

Zeek12

Clareman wrote: »

Twitter would be perfect, but don't forget that this would involve having someone to update it, that would either involve training or hiring someone, as they are under tight budget constraints I would imagine that this would be an issue.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not?

Get training, or new hires....just to use Twitter? Seriously?
Come on - sure it's child's play!

Mr. G

True, but were not all from ennis

Mr. G

Zeek12 wrote: »

Get training, or new hires....just to use Twitter? Seriously?
Come on - sure it's child's play!

Yeah that's Ireland.

Clareman

Zeek12 wrote: »

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not?

Get training, or new hires....just to use Twitter? Seriously?
Come on - sure it's child's play!

Ooooh wouldn't it be great if I was joking. Any changes to policies or procedures would need to be approved by management and unions, as well as that people would need to be told what can and cannot be done over the new medium. The amount of red tape involved in setting up something like this can be scary.

BTW, this isn't just contained to the public service, I worked in IT for a Financial Services company and was on the committee for web site access, not internet access, web site access. Only approved websites were accessible through work systems, if you wanted to get a new site added to the list you would need to get approval from director level, once that approval was granted it was put in front of the committee who met every 2 weeks and if they approved access it was granted, if more questions were needed it went back. An example of the madness was when Bank of Ireland changed their url for online banking, they changed it the day after the committee met which meant it was 13 days before people could do their online banking. As a member of the website committee thought I had full access to the internet so it didn't bother me

Zeek12

Just noticed some other Urban councils are using it. Galway City Council tweeting like mad there the last few weeks.

Zeek12

Clareman wrote: »

BTW, this isn't just contained to the public service, I worked in IT for a Financial Services company and was on the committee for web site access, not internet access, web site access. Only approved websites were accessible through work systems, if you wanted to get a new site added to the list you would need to get approval from director level, once that approval was granted it was put in front of the committee who met every 2 weeks and if they approved access it was granted, if more questions were needed it went back. An example of the madness was when Bank of Ireland changed their url for online banking, they changed it the day after the committee met which meant it was 13 days before people could do their online banking. As a member of the website committee thought I had full access to the internet so it didn't bother me

Jeez. That's a serious amount of red tape!
Makes you wonder how anything gets done in workplaces these days with all this crazy bureaucracy!