Boil Water Order in Fulton.

Boiling Water
(Photo by News Channel 9)

There was an e.coli scare my freshman year in the Fall of 2005. Everyone in the dorms received Aquafina water bottles in their mailboxes twice daily and was urged to keep their faces misaligned with the shower head when bathing. I worried about what I was going to drink, how I was going to brush my teeth, wash my hair, and make my hot tea in the morning!
It was pretty frightening.


These are the thoughts that ran through my head when we went to Fulton today to cover the boil water order. Luckily I was only a student when the scare happened on campus and I didn’t have to worry about cooking for my family or washing dishes in my home. However, these were some of the problems Fulton residents were facing when the order was issued.

We went to Save-a-Lot and interviewed Ed, the Assistant Manager, and a few other residents. Ed gave us a lot of information. He was very experienced, seeing as how Channel 9 and 10 had covered the story and interviewed him previous to us getting there. Our other interviews were decent; they contributed by sharing the burden of boiling water. We got a lot of pictures of bottled water and solutions such as frozen dinners that offer people alternatives to cooking with water.

However, it was very difficult to get enough pictures for the story because we were limited to our location in Save-a-Lot, and we didn’t have a lot of time to explore random restaurants because we were 45 minutes away from the familiarity of Syracuse. We could have improved the story by getting some pictures of people boiling water in their homes or pictures of people boiling water in a restaurant or school. This would have allowed our viewers to see the hardships of boil-water-orders.