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Atlanta boil water advisory lifted

ATLANTA — City leaders say Atlanta residents can safely drink the water again after a boil water advisory was lifted for a big part of the city.

City officials said there was an outage caused by a failure at the Hemphill Pump Station water plant on Monday.

Fulton County Commissioner Keisha Powell told Channel 2's Dave Huddleston during a maintenance check, one of the flow meters was reading incorrect information and shut itself down.

"We had to do some sampling to make sure we're protecting the public's health," Powell said about the advisory.

The boil water advisory was lifted Tuesday afternoon for Atlanta's 1.2 million water users.

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Powell said the 25-hour advisory was more of a precaution.

"I want to stress it was not the result of a power outage. We actually have two layers of redundancy here at the Hemphill facility," Powell said.

The boil water advisory forced some Atlanta families, especially those with little ones, to stock up on bottled water.

"Definitely a little more challenging. Been boiling water and just bought some water down at Trader Joe's, so trying to make it work," one parent said.

Powell said they are working to make sure the issue is corrected. But with two boil water advisories in two years, what is she doing to make sure this doesn't happen again?

"We understand the disruption, we have projects underway to upgrade Hemphill and we will continue those projects,” Powell said.

The commissioner told Huddleston that they will go back and check to see if they communicated properly with the public and the media to make sure everyone knew what was happening.