Instead, the printed-out piece of paper reads, “Pardon our mess, there is currently a citywide plumbing issue and we are only available to sell cigars out of the humidor.”
“Quickly, a couple of the neighbors just conferred with each other and quickly realized this is completely bigger than anything,” said General Manager, Ben Torres, remembering Monday night.
Ben said the water main break shut down water at the bar. They realized something was up around 4 p.m. and it took hours for them to realize that it was a city problem.
“It’s extremely frustrating that’s it’s taken so long to get updates, but to also understand what the cause of it was,” said Ben.
Right now, they’re one of many businesses under a boil advisory. Since they were impacted by the water main break, officials said they’ll need to boil any of the water they use that will be drunk.
Ben said they’re using water bottles and cleaning out the ice machine.
“We have to burn all the ice that was made in the machine, thoroughly vet that out and clean it,” said Ben.
Ben said he’s frustrated that the officials with Charlotte Water and the City waited too long to tell them what was going on. It wasn’t until six hours after the break, that they issued a boil advisory.
“It’s like, we’re playing catchup instead of actually being proactive with some of these areas,” said Ben.
He said they lost thousands of dollars in business from Monday night. Likely, that will be the same for Tuesday.
“We’re still going to operate as normal, to the best that we can today,” said Ben.
