Water woes end in smiles

But after the boil order had been lifted on Tuesday morning, commuters were smiling again — cradling cherished cups of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, which hadn’t been in service for a couple of days — some expressing a renewed vote of confidence for how the state and local cities handled the crisis.

“You’ve got to trust the municipalities to do the right thing and keep our best interests in the forefront. They responded very well,’’ said Tim Whelan of Marblehead.

On Saturday, immediately after Governor Deval Patrick announced the boil order and word spread that it might be weeks before clean drinking water would be available, hospitals, schools, and other major institutions north of Boston implemented emergency management plans to provide fresh water and to prevent widespread illness.

Everett’s Whidden Hospital, Somerville Hospital, Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford, and Melrose-Wakefield Hospital in Melrose — along with more than a dozen other outpatient clinics in those communities — began using bottled water Saturday afternoon, serving it up for patients and also carting gallons into the operating rooms and emergency rooms for physicians to scrub up with before surgery.

“Their hands were fully clean before they touched a patient,’’ said Christian Lanphere, manager of emergency preparedness for Cambridge Health Alliance — the organization that runs Whidden Hospital in Everett, and Somerville Hospital. Lanphere said as part of its emergency management plan, hospitals like Whidden and Somerville have hundreds of gallons of fresh bottled water stored for catastrophes.

Area schools began contacting parents directly on Saturday, issuing recorded announcements about changes from hot to cold lunches and requesting that students bring bottled water from home.

In Somerville, where 5,000 students attend 13 schools, boiled and bottled water was available for hand washing, as well as hand sanitizer for after washing. Gretchen Kinder, coordinator of public information for the school district, said the district procured bottled water from the city.

At large residential areas, such as the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home and Revere’s Jack Satter House, workers began posting notices on residents’ doors, warning them to boil water. Steve Post, executive director of the 266-unit Jack Satter House, an elderly housing complex, said they boiled water for soups and gravies and distributed 300 gallons of bottled water to residents on Monday.

Sandy Levin, who has lived in the Jack Satter House for 10 years, said she had reminded several neighbors along her hall not to drink the tap water. “There were a few who were drinking it and I was concerned about it,’’ said Levin, formerly of Malden.

At the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, the 400 animals continued to drink tap water. “Their natural resistance is always high,’’ said John Linehan, president and chief executive officer of Zoo New England. Linehan said his staff was closely monitoring the animals and none had become sick since Saturday. “It’s impossible to boil the kind of water that it would take to keep hundreds of animals provisioned,’’ he said.

Free bottled water was available throughout the region as trucks containing water procured from the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency lumbered onto highways and back roads. In some towns, like Saugus and Winthrop, the water seemed to run out right away. In Saugus, residents snapped up 5,000 gallons of water in an hour; in Winthrop 5,000 gallons were given away on Sunday and another 7,000 were available on Monday. Melrose and Malden also quickly exhausted their allotments of 5,000 gallons per city.

Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com. Globe correspondents Alix Roy and Danielle Dreilinger contributed to this story.