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Communication is underwater

Communication is underwater

The August 26 water outage in South Pescara

I have a second home in Pescara, where I grew up, and this past week I found myself dealing with a very practical problem: no water from the tap for over twenty-four hours. On the evening of August 26, Aca, the company that runs the local water service, cut off the supply across the entire southern part of the city for work on the Giardino aqueduct, a project funded through Italy’s PNRR recovery plan. The cut started at 9 pm, and the works were due to wrap up by around 6 am the next morning, with full service restored by evening.

That’s the timeline. What interests me more, after a quarter century in communication, is how Aca chose to inform residents, and how much that choice made an already unpleasant situation worse, in the middle of summer and with temperatures running high for what was the season’s fifth heatwave.

Aca’s official notice

The text the company released, and that local outlets picked up almost word for word, opened like this: “Please be advised that, in execution of the final works related to the PNRR M2C4 14.1 A.28 project, finalized to complete the hydraulic connections that, once built, will allow the new supply main to enter service, the following interventions are planned.” One single sentence, over sixty words long, before reaching the only information that actually mattered to readers: when the water would go, and where.

Next came the addresses of the three work sites, the suspension and restoration times, a link to an attached map, and the marginal but useful note about tanker deliveries for vulnerable non-commercial users. Taken together, a technically accurate document that failed as communication. Let’s go through why, point by point.

A warning issued once the works were already at the door

The notice went out on August 25 for works starting the very next day, at 9pm. Less than twenty-four hours to get organized: stock up on water, fill a few containers, warn anyone at home who needs extra care, such as young children or older relatives. In a seaside city at the end of August, with flats full of guests and families on holiday, a warning this short leaves no time to react. It leaves only enough time to discover the problem while already living through it.

Too many technicalities, not enough substance

The name of the PNRR project, the intervention code, the references to lots and phases: all correct information, but the kind that weighs down a message without helping readers understand what to do in the hours ahead. A service notice serves a different purpose than a document filed for the record: it has to land and be understood at a glance, often read in a hurry on a phone on the way out the door.

The work site addresses caused confusion instead of clarity

Listing the three site addresses, viale Pindaro, via D’Annunzio at via Conte di Ruvo, via D’Annunzio at via Italica, makes sense for anyone managing traffic, not for anyone trying to work out whether they’ll have water. Many residents, reading those addresses, assumed the disruption only concerned those streets and their immediate surroundings, not the entire southern district. The result: plenty of people never prepared, because the notice, while listing the right facts, put them in the wrong order, giving weight to a technical detail instead of the information that actually mattered.

A hand-drawn map, tucked at the end and hosted on Google Drive

The reference to a map of the affected area came at the very bottom of the notice, after everything else, and pointed to a Google Drive link. Once opened, the file turned out to be a hand-annotated map, hard to read, with no clear key showing where the affected zone actually ended. Information this critical, the exact boundaries of a disruption, calls for a properly designed image, with the zone clearly shaded, placed directly in the body of the notice rather than hidden behind an external attachment that demands another click, another page, another load.

Too much optimism about the timing, a promise no one could guarantee

The notice stated a precise end time for the works, 6am, and a precise restoration time, the evening of the 27th. Except the works didn’t keep to that schedule, and the water came back later than promised. Fair enough, public works always carry some risk: a fault, a fitting that won’t hold, a delay in logistics. Delays happen; what actually erodes trust is having ruled one out in advance. Better to communicate a wide time window, with a commitment to update residents if anything changes, than to promise an exact hour and then have to walk it back, losing credibility at the very moment it matters most.

The disruption spread beyond the announced boundaries

This wasn’t only a matter of poorly chosen words. Anyone who tried calling Aca’s call centre for information, overnight or the next day, ran into staff with no real updates: no confirmation on timing, no accurate answer on which streets were actually affected. And the water shortage didn’t stay within the boundaries of south Pescara either: some streets north of the river, which the notice said should have been unaffected, went dry as well. A clear notice on its own has limited value if the execution then contradicts it, and the people answering the phones don’t know what to tell callers.

Plain language is missing, exactly when it matters most

I wrote an article on inclusive language a while back, built on a simple principle: a text is genuinely inclusive when anyone can understand it, regardless of education level or familiarity with technical jargon. The same applies here. An emergency notice written in bureaucratese excludes exactly the people who need it most: those living alone, those with health conditions, those unfamiliar with government websites or Google Drive. Choosing plain language matters for equal access to public information, well beyond stylistic preference.

Rewriting the notice: what, when, where, why

Here’s a rewrite, using the same information in a different order:

“From 9pm on Wednesday, August 26 to Thursday evening, August 27, water will be off across south Pescara (see map). Works on the Giardino aqueduct, funded through the PNRR, will make the water network more reliable long term. Crews will work through the night: restoration could run later if anything goes wrong, and we’ll keep this channel updated. Anyone who needs water delivered by tanker can call […].”

Four pieces of information, in the order readers expect them: what’s happening, when, where, why. Everything else, work site addresses included, can stay available for anyone who wants more detail, but it shouldn’t take up the opening lines.

What effective institutional communication looks like

The best emergency communications share a few easy-to-spot traits: a headline that states the essentials right away (“water off in south Pescara, Aug 26-27”), a body organized around the four key questions from the very first lines, a legible map embedded in the text rather than attached separately, a single official channel updated in real time instead of static notices, a call centre briefed on the same information and able to actually answer callers, and language that anyone, age sixteen to eighty, can understand without reading it twice. None of this requires a large communications department. It requires a method, and the willingness to put the reader, not the institution doing the writing, at the centre of the message.

Why clarity in a crisis is a skill, not a detail

Anyone working in a public utility already has enough to manage during a technical emergency without also fielding hundreds of calls from people who never understood the notice in the first place. Writing well, in these situations, pays off directly: it reduces the load on call centres, avoids avoidable backlash, and rebuilds trust in an essential service. If Aca, or any other organization facing a communication challenge like this one, ever needs a hand writing notices people understand at a glance, I’m available.

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Chiara Bonifazi