When a utility is notified of an exceedance under the Lead and Copper Rule, it faces perhaps its most important public communications challenge. Why? Because the Water World is STILL dealing with the negative impacts of what happened in Flint, Michigan. In every single exceedance WaterPIO has handled, reporters sought to make a negative connection with Flint every single time. The Lead and Copper Rule Improvements creates several communication trapdoors for water utilities, with none more potentially catastrophic than the requirement that they publicly communicate systemwide exceedances within 24 hours of being informed by their state regulators. And there will be more exceedances to communicate. It is estimated there will be a 40% increase in systemwide lead exceedances across the country under the new regulations. Unfortunately, the 24-hour public notification requirement means that almost all water systems will lose the ability to fully map out their operational response (Action Plan) before they have to communicate it to the public. Even utilities with Action Plans at the ready rarely have crisis communication plans to go along with them. As a result, if a utility is not prepared in advance, the initial public communication about its exceedance will likely amount to an information dump of the EPA's and state’s harshest and coldest language. It will be guaranteed to cause press and social media uproars. The release of the initial inventories and the mailing of “30-day” letters to customers with lead, galvanized requiring replacement, or “unknown” lines created significant issues for utilities that either failed to proactively inform the public the inventories and letters were coming or used poorly written public information materials that created expectations the utilities would replace the lines immediately AND pay for the replacements themselves. WaterPIO has successfully handled crisis communications with the press, public, elected officials, and community leaders about LCR exceedances in several states. The presentation will show how we gained press and public understanding of our clients' exceedances through open communication and how we have diffused attempts to connect their exceedances to Flint's lead crisis. We’ll show how to plan ahead so elected officials and community leaders are not caught off guard by an exceedance notification, as well as how to use emergency notification systems for the sensitive communication, based on 18 years of using such systems for water (and wastewater) emergencies.