As I walked out hauling a dozen bottles, a red city car with flashing red lights, looking like a 1970s sedan, was blaring warnings to boil water. The neighbors I encountered--and in Jamaica Plain, Boston's most diverse and, I objectively say best, neighborhood, everyone treats everyone else as a neighbor--were talking about how long to boil water (at least a minute), whether pasta is the failsafe solution (yes), who had water left, when they heard the news. By 9 pm we had received a recorded message from the city on our land line and I, impressively, had received the same message on my cell phone:
The Massachusetts Water Resource Authority has issued a boil-water order for all households in the city of Boston. Water must be boiling for at least one minute before it is safe to drink. Do not use any tap water for cooking, baby formula, tooth brushing, or food preparation that has not been boiled first or is not bottled. Please be sure to check on elderly or vulnerable neighbors.
I found out where people go to buy water in my neighborhood--the
co-op supermarket and CVS, whose bottled-water shelves were nearly empty. When a clerk rolled up with a cart holding several cartons of small bottles of Dasani water, shoppers appeared from nowhere to rush him, including two mothers with strollers. Things were worse in other communities: police had to break up customers at a BJ's, and shoppers were "literally fighting over" water in the aisles of a supermarket in West Roxbury, the next town over, and a market I'd considered going to if JP stores ran out.
The larger problem for restaurants and people in food service is knowing what they can and can't do. The first problem is tea, coffee, and soda, and the answer is: stop serving all of them, unless the soda came in bottles and you've boiled the water first. Starbucks has stopped serving all coffee and tea as of today in all stores in Boston and other affected towns, open only for food and for drinks in bottles. Dunkin Donuts told stores to stop selling coffee unless they could first boil it. In practice that means stores aren't making any hot drinks, according to the man who answered the phone at the busy JP Dunkin. (Update: at 5:15 it had locked the doors.)

Corby Kummer
Same with cold drinks: the right thing to do is shut down all soda machines, as the exemplary City Feed, whose owner, David Warner, wrote an eloquent rebuttal to my piece on Walmart produce, did by late afternoon last night, taping this sign to its soda machine from the artisan, family-owned soda maker Boylan, which uses (of course) only natural flavor extracts and cane syrup. But across the street, JP Licks, a huge and very popular ice cream shop, had no sign attached to its "bubbler--a regional term I love for faucets where customers can get (non-bubbly) drinking water--and hadn't turned off the supply. It should have posted a sign like City Feed's, or like the one an AP story described at Ula's, a JP bakery-cafe also in JP: "Don't drink me." (Kate Bancroft, the always-smiling, rail-thin co-owner of the extremely popular cafe, was the only local merchant quoted in a sobersided state-officials story, lending credence to my theory that all Boston journalists live in Jamaica Plain.) I also wondered whether the store should be running its frozen-yogurt makers, which I hope contain only pre-made mixes, liquid included, but I assume include large amounts of piped-in water too. And I wondered about the water the ice-cream scoops were being washed in. (Update: At 5:00 there was a plastic cup blocking access to the bubbler, and a piece of cardboard with big block letters saying "NO GO ON THE H2O"; as for the scoops, the water supply had been shut off to the metal tub for the scoops, and it was being regularly drained and filled with cooled boiled water.)