The restaurant business is tough enough. In Saratoga, a boil water advisory made it even harder

SARATOGA SPRINGS – A long crack in a main water pipe left restaurants scrambling to buy bags of ice and bottles of water so they could open Friday.

The entire city was under a boil water order, starting late Thursday night. The state Department of Health expects to lift it Saturday afternoon if a final water test is clean.

For the average resident, the order just means boiling a pot of water for a minute, then using it all day rather than the faucet.

But for restaurants and bars, it requires a series of expensive and time-consuming chores just to stay open.

At Olde Bryan Inn and Forno Bistro, workers started their day before 10:30 a.m. by covering stovetops with pots of water. Then they scooped all the ice out of every ice machine and turned them off. Next up was the bathrooms, which had to be stocked with bottled water and signs warning people not to use the faucets.

Some had little option but to close.

Mike Sirianni, owner of Saratoga City Tavern, came in early to agonize over the situation. He had no stovetop to boil water. His ice machine has a UV filter, but that’s not considered good enough during a boil water order. He could use bagged ice, but the cost and quality worried him.

“Bagged ice is terrible for making drinks. It clumps together,” he said.

The state Department of Health also recommended using plastic cups, which he abhors.

“You gonna put a martini in a plastic cup?” he said. “I always say, we’re going to do it right or we’re not going to do it.”

So he closed.

“I’m closing for one day, just praying it isn’t two days,” he said.

After all, he said grimly, he got through the COVID-19 closure.

“I don’t want to get anybody sick,” he added. “We just got through COVID. I don’t want to kill anyone now.”

Some decided to open at any expense. The owner of Gaffney’s Restaurant and Bar had 1,500 pounds of ice delivered, along with boxes of canned soda and bottled water.

Gaffney’s goes through about 1,500 cups a day of mixed drinks, such as rum and Coke, said bartender Christian Stearns.

He couldn’t use the soda dispenser. It’s considered contaminated because it’s hooked to the water line.

Other than beer, which was safe to pour, “basically all the drinks” use that dispenser, he said. It has soda, sour, iced tea and other popular mixes.

“Thank God it’s a rainy weekend,” he said. “On Fridays and Saturdays it’ll usually be shoulder to shoulder in here.”

Restaurants weren’t as hard hit, because they could boil water early in the day and then use it for cooking.

At Taquero, the boil water advisory was under control long before the lunch rush.

“It’s more or less just washing our hands with bottled water,” said cook Anthony Coon.

They had four cases of bottled water, which they were also using to mix with the batter for doughnuts.

It won’t be over for restaurateurs when the boil water order is lifted. They’ll have to disinfect every tube that leads to city water, including soda fountains and ice makers.

What happened?

The mess began when a main water pipe cracked under Green Street Thursday. City workers carefully inserted a valve to reroute the water before they cut out 10 feet of pipe and replaced it Thursday evening.

“We were able to maintain pretty decent (water) pressure all over the city. But the health department said because it was the main, we had to do a boil water order,” said Commissioner of Public Works Anthony “Skip” Scirocco. He hadn’t expected it and was surprised to get the order at 10 p.m. Thursday.

It’s not clear what caused the crack, which stretched lengthwise along the pipe.

“Pipe looks like it was brand new. It’s been in there since the ’30s,” he said.

But the health department said the crack could have allowed dangerous contamination into the water system.

“Boil water notices are typically issued when an unexpected condition has caused a potential for biological contamination of water in a public water system,” said Department of Health spokeswoman Erin Silk. “These often result from other events such as water line breaks, treatment disruptions, power outages and floods.”

So far, the system has tested clean, Scirocco said.

Turnaround time for bacteriological samples is usually 24 hours, Silk said. The final test was sent to a laboratory Friday afternoon, and results are expected Saturday afternoon.