Atlanta is launching the most ambitious overhaul of its drinking water system in decades, moving to replace aging pipes and infrastructure that failed spectacularly in 2024 and left large parts of the city without safe water for days.

The city's Department of Watershed Management is hiring a program management team to lead what it's calling the Atlanta Drinking Water Renewal and Replacement program, or ADWRR. The effort is designed to systematically work through a backlog of deferred maintenance across a system that serves roughly 1.2 million people in Atlanta and surrounding counties, running through about 2,800 miles of water mains, many of them cast iron pipes installed in the early 20th century.

The urgency is hard to overstate. In June 2024, a catastrophic break on a major transmission main near midtown triggered a citywide crisis: hundreds of thousands of residents lost water service, boil-water advisories stretched for days, hospitals scrambled, and businesses shut down. Mayor Andre Dickens declared a state of emergency. The breaks drew national comparisons to the 2022 water collapse in Jackson, Mississippi, and renewed long-standing criticism that Atlanta had spent decades prioritizing its federally mandated sewer overhaul while letting its drinking water system quietly deteriorate.

That sewer overhaul, required under consent decrees Atlanta signed with the EPA and the State of Georgia in 1998 and 1999, has consumed more than $4 billion since then. The drinking water side of the system got comparatively little attention during that period, and the 2024 failures made the consequences of that tradeoff visible to the entire country.

Federal money is now helping change the calculus. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed roughly $50 billion nationally toward water infrastructure, and Georgia is expected to receive more than $800 million over five years through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. That influx gives Atlanta a rare window to tackle a problem it has long lacked the capital to address.

The ADWRR program follows a model used by other large utilities, including DC Water and Baltimore, where a single contractor or team manages planning, design, and construction across a rolling portfolio of renewal projects rather than handling each pipe replacement as a standalone job. The full solicitation was posted April 13, 2026, though the total contract value and full program timeline have not yet been made public.

Equity advocates have pushed for the program to prioritize historically underserved neighborhoods, where infrastructure tends to be oldest and communities have the least capacity to absorb disruptions. Atlanta's poverty rate hovers near 20 percent, and the city's demographics mean that crumbling pipes often run under some of its lowest-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.

What comes next depends heavily on who gets hired and what the program's full scope turns out to be. The city has not yet announced a contractor selection timeline, but Atlanta residents and regional water customers will be watching closely after two years that made plain what failing infrastructure actually costs.