City leaders give update on Baltimore's E. coli contamination, boil water advisory

BALTIMORE -- Baltimore City officials will be giving their first press briefing in two days regarding the wide-ranging Boil Water Advisory.

E. coli was detected in West Baltimore water samples over the weekend. A Boil Water Advisory was issued Monday.

"My fear is that I think we're not going to have water for quite some time," West Baltimore resident Debbie Taggart said. "Y'all (in city government are) constantly going up on our water bills, but yet we're out here getting sick from contaminated water."

City officials say it's not clear whether anyone has gotten sick from contaminated water, although multiple people have reported having gastrointestinal symptoms.

"How are you gonna boil water if you got kids and everything? You can't survive like that," Greg Rhodes said Wednesday at Harlem Park Elementary Middle School, one of the city's three water distribution sites. "(Mayor) Brandon Scott, he's got to do something better than this, man. It's crazy."

Some people told WJZ people that they were still drinking water in the affected area into Wednesday.

"We did not find out until late Monday evening after we had drank the water," Taggart said.

City Councilman Eric Costello, D-District 11, said city agencies were relaying incorrect information to each other about which buildings were inside the Advisory zone.

"There's a lot of confusing communication right now coming out of the Department of Public Works," Costello said. "(There's) a lot of questions as to the timeframe from when this was reported."

Taggart said she's experiencing a sore throat and worried that it has something to do with her drinking water. She has been delivering water to neighbors who are homebound.

"They don't know when this water's gonna be cleaned up," she said. "No one's said anything on the news."