Fact-check: water leak at State Farm Arena (Fulton County, Georgia)
No pipe burst, the minor water leak didn't interrupt counting (just slowed it down).
Claim: There was a water main break that caused workers to flee, during which time the ballots weren’t secured, allowing fake ballots to be inserted.
Finding: There was a minor leak, it didn’t cause people to flee, at no time were ballots not secure, and it didn’t impact counting.
Verdict: misrepresented
There are many claims about a “water main break” at the State Farm Arena, office space Fulton County had leased for ballot counting. An example of this claim is Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, where he says:
…it’s been reported that they said there was a major water main break. Everybody fled the area. And then they came back…
Trump published a press release where he made similar allegations.
In Georgia, a pipe burst in a faraway location, totally unrelated to the location of what was happening, and they stopped counting for four hours, and a lot of things happened.
Here’s what really happened:
At 1am, workers secured the ballots and went home for the night to get sleep, during which time surveillance cameras and guards kept watch.
At 5:22am, a minor water leak was noticed, coming from a clogged toilet in the floor above, leaking down into the room where ballots were being counted, forming a puddle.
Around 6:00am, cleanup efforts started, moving tables out of the way and vacuuming up the water.
Around 10:00am, counting resumed, only slightly delayed.
This was widely misrepresented in the news media [*][*][*], where a water leak was reported as a “burst pipe” or “water main break”. There was no burst pipe. There was instead a minor leak from a toilet in the floor above.
This was widely misinterpreted as interrupting the counting process. In fact, the counting had officially already been stopped at 1am in the morning to let people sleep. It wasn’t schedule to resume until the next morning.
The official statement from State Farm Arena accurately describes what happened.
Surveillance videos are online for people to watch to verify that nothing nefarious happened.
The news media shares some of the blame. Official statements about a “leak” were re-interpreted by the media as a “burst pipe” then a “water main break”. Rather than relying on primary sources, they mostly reported what other media outlets reported.
In summary, the story is wildly misrepresented, even by the news media. The leak didn’t interrupt the counting — it was already interrupted to let people sleep. The room was under surveillance the entire time — there’s no evidence anything nefarious happened.