It wasn’t ICD-10, meaningful use, OCR HIPAA breach audits or interoperability issues that created the most unusual buzz at HIMSS13 here on Sunday. No, it was a different phrase altogether: “Boil-water alert.”

“This is the first time I’ve heard ‘don’t drink the water’ at a HIMSS annual conference,” said JoAnn Klinedinst, vice president of professional development at HIMSS. “And this is my 17th consecutive conference!”

That also makes it the first time that H. Stephen Lieber, HIMSS CEO, has been spotted posting warning signs around bathroom entryways that read “Do NOT Drink Until Further Notice Per the City Health Department.”

News that was received with a collective gasp when Tom Walsh, president of Tom Walsh Consulting, and other speakers relayed it during a crowded and weighty session about preparing for federal audits Sunday morning, telling attendees only to use specific bathrooms because of water pressure problems — evoking chuckles eluding to the recent cruise tragedy and the power outage during Super Bowl XLVII.

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At 12:31 p.m. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu tweeted that the “water pressure stabilized across most of city; however, boil water advisory remains in effect until further notice.” By 1 p.m. New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board executive director Marcia St. Martin, speaking at a press conference, traced the problem back to the agency’s South Claiborne Avenue power plant, where a small fire took out the electricity for approximately 20 minutes, long enough to dip water pressure below federal standards, thereby necessitating the city to issue a boil-water alert.

“The strain was much less Sunday than it would have been on Monday,” Lieber explained, because the first day of the conference, as expected, saw about 4,000 attendees in the convention center of the slightly fewer than 40,000 expected in total. “It’s just one of those things and we’re managing quite well.”

Handling Sunday’s water situation for Yuichiro “Ichiro” Matsui and Takahiro “Taka” Shintani, a product engineer and IT solution manager, respectively, for Fukuda Denshi, meant “difficulty finding coffee this morning. A lot of places were closed,” outside the convention center, Mastui said. By mid-afternoon, the water pressure in the men’s bathrooms was still not turned back on.

The two are in New Orleans from Redmond, Wash., representing the cardiology instrumentation, patient monitoring and ultrasound technologies manufacturer.

“We had to walk the whole [convention center],” Shintani chuckled, gesturing a hand back and forth to indicate how long the building is. “It was good exercise.”

For Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, New Orleans health commissioner and senior policy advisor to the mayor, who was scheduled to attend the HIMSS show, the water issues meant prioritizing the emergency — a reaction that may serve as last-minute fodder for the talk she is slated to give on Monday at 1 p.m. local time titled Healthcare Recovery: Critical Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina.

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