Everything seemed normal this morning when I woke up – but then I remembered: The city of Boston has a burst water main. The ten foot diameter pipe that brings ALL of our potable water from the ONE SOURCE that could provide it, apparently crapped itself at 10am yesterday. All those precious civic fluids went bubbling and flowing up through a couple of feet of soil – and then ran down a hill into the Charles River. Apparently this instantly doubled the flow of the Charles – raising it by 8 inches. Or something. Reports were sometimes superficially stupid, but they became vacuous if you read them carefully enough. We’ve been cut over to the “pond water” supply that they have on hand.
They told us to boil our water. Fortunately I had 6 gallons of spring water ready. Unfortunately, I had been planning to make beer with that water. In any event, we’ve got a gallon in the bathroom for tooth brushing and another 5 (minus the piddly amount we used today) in the kitchen. There was some noise on the news about not washing in this foul, foul, replacement water … but I used the STEAM SANITIZE, BITCHES setting on my dishwasher. I assume that whatever well-filtered foulness is in the clean looking, great smelling water coming out of my tap will be defeated by STEAM.
Of course, I also took the precaution of boiling 5 gallons of tap water in my idle main brew pot. That’s sitting on the stove, with a ladle for looks.
Word on the street is that they were working on getting a backup, redundant system running -AKA- the old and perfectly functional one. However, with only seven years since installation on the new system – they just didn’t have time. I totally know how that is.
First one to compare this situation with the privations in Haiti gets one free punch right in the crotch.
