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...and the Arrakeen for water
Jun. 5th, 2006 09:36 amA few of you noted the toss-off comment yesterday about no water here. We had a big windstorm Saturday afternoon, which managed to take down a mess of power poles west of here, and somewhere in there, a fuse blew on the pole that powers our communal well (60 families in a rural enclave surrounded by rapidly encroaching, expensively priced suburbia). The fuse goes out 'way too often; it's severely taxed by said suburbia (which is on city water so doesn't suffer when all those air conditioners blow out the power supply to our well). The power outage itself was a two-minute on-off-on blip.
No water in this enclave means no cooling--because most of us have evaporative coolers--not to mention nothing for the people or the livestock. The high for the day yesterday was 106F. It was 100 degrees in this house. Luckily my neighbors have their own well and were willing to run a hose through the fence, so I was able to fill a stock tank and a bunch of barrels for the horses. But there was nothing in the house but bottled water (which would have been a minor hardship), and no cooling (which was major).
At midafternoon the well guy came by to report that he had been trying since the night before to get the power company (TEP) to come and fix the problem. TEP told him, "We have more important problems than yours." He had discovered that if one has livestock, one can legally call the fire department to bring a tanker and fill up tanks for the stock, and they will charge TEP for it--too late for me, but if it happens again, that's the first call I'll make. He was asking all of us to make a stink, because we were so far down the list of priorities that we might not see water for days. In the desert. In the summer. With daily highs of 105F and up.
Mind you, when 3 houses in Oro Valley lose water for an hour, it makes the nightly news. If there is a 20-minute power outage at midtown, it's on the front page of the paper. We can lose power for two days and nobody even notices. If a house burns down out here, it might as well never have happened--but if there's a room scorched in a trailer elsewhere, it's right there in the Hourly Updates. We're the Invisible Enclave. Yep, that's us. There was a big outage in the city Saturday, with lines down and poles broken, but that still doesn't justify leaving us without coolers on the hottest day of the year so far. They are supposed to respond within 4 hours--not 28.
When my dad the retired waterworks honcho heard this, he blew a gasket. And Made Some Calls. And within the hour, we had water. Yay Dad. If he hadn't stepped in, I'm sure we'd have had to wait until this morning to get the fuse fixed.
Today my brain is still parboiled, and I'm limping from the tendon that popped while I was hauling several hundred feet of hose (nearly OK today, just a little sore, thank goodness, thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
casacorona's excellent advice), but I have coolers and water and the horses have plenty to drink--even if Tia does think the tank is her personal swimming pool and keeps trying to climb in.
Life in the desert.
Haven't been back to see the baaaaaby since Friday, what with work and the water crisis, but I'll be out there later this week. Got to see how much he's grown.
No water in this enclave means no cooling--because most of us have evaporative coolers--not to mention nothing for the people or the livestock. The high for the day yesterday was 106F. It was 100 degrees in this house. Luckily my neighbors have their own well and were willing to run a hose through the fence, so I was able to fill a stock tank and a bunch of barrels for the horses. But there was nothing in the house but bottled water (which would have been a minor hardship), and no cooling (which was major).
At midafternoon the well guy came by to report that he had been trying since the night before to get the power company (TEP) to come and fix the problem. TEP told him, "We have more important problems than yours." He had discovered that if one has livestock, one can legally call the fire department to bring a tanker and fill up tanks for the stock, and they will charge TEP for it--too late for me, but if it happens again, that's the first call I'll make. He was asking all of us to make a stink, because we were so far down the list of priorities that we might not see water for days. In the desert. In the summer. With daily highs of 105F and up.
Mind you, when 3 houses in Oro Valley lose water for an hour, it makes the nightly news. If there is a 20-minute power outage at midtown, it's on the front page of the paper. We can lose power for two days and nobody even notices. If a house burns down out here, it might as well never have happened--but if there's a room scorched in a trailer elsewhere, it's right there in the Hourly Updates. We're the Invisible Enclave. Yep, that's us. There was a big outage in the city Saturday, with lines down and poles broken, but that still doesn't justify leaving us without coolers on the hottest day of the year so far. They are supposed to respond within 4 hours--not 28.
When my dad the retired waterworks honcho heard this, he blew a gasket. And Made Some Calls. And within the hour, we had water. Yay Dad. If he hadn't stepped in, I'm sure we'd have had to wait until this morning to get the fuse fixed.
Today my brain is still parboiled, and I'm limping from the tendon that popped while I was hauling several hundred feet of hose (nearly OK today, just a little sore, thank goodness, thanks to
casacorona's excellent advice), but I have coolers and water and the horses have plenty to drink--even if Tia does think the tank is her personal swimming pool and keeps trying to climb in. Life in the desert.
Haven't been back to see the baaaaaby since Friday, what with work and the water crisis, but I'll be out there later this week. Got to see how much he's grown.
