Citywide advisory turned Winnipeg's water world on its head

I was in a Safeway with a Tim Hortons when the boil water advisory was announced.

"Should I dump this pot of coffee?" a Tim Hortons employee asked her co-worker. She casually mentioned the advisory on the news, as if everyone already knew. I was stunned.

A boil water advisory? In Winnipeg?

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I don't have a smartphone or tablet, so I couldn't check the internet. I had no idea if it was big news or small. Had something catastrophic happened? Was the global ecological crisis finally wreaking havoc on our city?

I didn't pause long to think. I made a beeline toward the water aisle, where a small crowd was rapidly stripping its shelves. Half the area was already empty. All the large bottles of purified or spring water had already been claimed.

Some strong-backed fellow was filling one of the giant jugs that no one likes lugging home. The best I could find were two-litre bottles of carbonated water, so I grabbed four of the remaining six. Leaving behind six-packs of flavoured water, I checked out.

Exiting the store, I couldn't help but look to see who else was in the know whose bags had the telltale bulges of bottles.

Not the apocalypse

It all seems pretty ridiculous right now. It was a boil water advisory, not an apocalyptic Shoal Lake has been sucked dry advisory. This wasn't the end of civilization.

When I got home, there were no stoic reports on the radio. There was one story on CBC, and a simple announcement on the City of Winnipeg's website.

Yet, everyone knew about it very quickly. I got an email from my brother, a text from a friend.

The news itself was not dramatic. Six testing sites had detected low levels of bacteria. Some contained the presence of E. coli.

There was no mass sickness. No flooded emergency rooms. No crisis at all, only a precautionary note in the air. Crisis prevented. Or, perhaps, wrongly predicted a false alarm, a fire drill.

The most unusual circumstances soon become mundane. Reading the precautions, I realized this would be a nuisance, not a threat to daily life as we know it.

My boyfriend had to boil water to wash the dishes. One time I accidentally washed an apple under the tap, and promptly put some fresh water on to boil, to wash off the first washing.

Businesses affected

Still, the boil water advisory had a non-trivial effect on businesses.

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I heard that Starbucks and Tim Hortons had to stop selling drinks like iced capps and hot chocolate, anything that was made with tap water. And around town, bottled water sold out.

I now saw that my eight litres of bottled water were a convenience, not a necessity. My boyfriend chastised me for hoarding so much water instead of letting others buy it.

The advisory was lifted on Thursday, two days after it was announced. I still had four unopened litres of carbonated water. I felt pretty silly.

Psychologically jarring

Looking back, you could say it was a minor blip. You could say that it didn't matter, that it was a mistake. But judging from my own reactions and those around me, I don't feel that it was a small event, psychologically.

For a few days, the boil water advisory caused me to question the firm foundations of our modern day comforts. I questioned the safety of a water system we take for granted all the time. It amazed me that something sound and good could become dirty and dangerous in the span of a day.

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If it hadn't been a false alarm, what would we be learning now? Would we discover that our city is far more precarious than we assume? How would this change our lives?

And what about our future as citizens of a peaceful and orderly society?

What if?

In those few moments of collective panicwell-hidden, but still brewing beneath the surfaceI suddenly realized that if some vital service broke down, we could fall apart as a society. Our customary, quiet civility would evaporate into hysteria.

What if there was a horrendous disaster in our food system, for example? As a community, we simply aren't prepared. All we know, as individuals, is how to fill our own shopping carts. But what would we do, as a society, if the stores were running out of food?

When I went back to Safeway Thursday, I noticed that the shelves on the ends of the aisles were bare. For a minute, I wondered if they had held potable beverages that were now sold out. But on the price plates, I read the names of many types of products.

When I went through the checkout, the cashier explained that they change their sales on Thursday nights. The bareness was, in fact, a sign that the system is still working.

For most of history, life wasn't nearly so comfortable. This month's boil water advisory reminded me how far we've come and what we have to lose.