Saturday, July 19, 2008

H2O

Do you realize how valuable water is? The next few days will tell…will tell the citizens of Guaymas and Empalme.

You see the public water supply for Guaymas and Empalme was scheduled to be turned off beginning today at 8:00pm and turned back on on Tues at 8:00pm – although Lolita told us that it was actually turned off yesterday. During this time, the government will conduct a study on groundwater wells for public use.

So how do these two communities get through 4 days with no running water? Well, our apt has a tinaco on the roof. I don’t completely understand how it works, but a tinaco stores water. So we’ll have that supply until the tinaco is emptied. (That’s why we would not have noticed when the water was actually turned off yesterday.)

We also filled up our Coleman cooler and our dirty clothes bucket with water from the shower so we’ll have enough for basics like flushing the toilet. For purified water, we had our 2 five gallon containers filled and we topped off our other 2 small containers. Lastly, we have some purified water bottles stashed in the refrigerator.



We won’t do any laundry and showers will be QUICK! Hopefully, with our conservation we won’t run out and the government will turn the water back on as promised….

The irony of it all is that it started raining during the night and this morning it is still coming down hard. This is the first day of hard rain we’ve experienced here in Guaymas. Rain when there is no running water. Funny, huh?

4 comments:

1st Mate said...

Good for you, you'll be very glad you stashed all that water. Tuesday! That's a rather long time to have dry taps. Hope it's worth it.

Brenda Maas said...

When we were on the Baja last year we were out in the country and they had to have their water trucked in, so major water conservation was a way of life there. We kept track of our water usage while we were there and found that we used about the amount our tinaco holds in about a week. That was with washing dishes, laundry, and all normal usage; but being careful.
Our tinaco is filled from our landlords underground reservoir and our landlady assured us we would be fine. We are still being very careful though. Thank goodness it has rained both Friday and Saturday so I don't need to water the plants at all.

Steve Cotton said...

Every time I read about water, I think about Andee's posts from Chacala when the water was turned off for a long period and then when it was available only 4 hours each day. It is a good lesson about appreciating the small big things.

Gary Denness said...

Welcome to my Mexico! Water being turned off in my part of the city is a very regular thing. Especially in rainy season - go figure! It can go off at any time, any day and there is never a warning. Sometimes it's just for a few hours, sometimes it can be off for a couple of days. And we have no storage tank. It makes life hell!

But I'm lucky, really. There are places in the city who get it much worse than I.

Another side effect of the water here, are the occasional holes that open up in the ground, due to too much water being sucked out of the ground. A few months back a 20 foot wide, 40 foot deep hole opened up and sucked a guy in to his death.

I'm always much more careful, in times of stress, about how I phrase my curses and rants....I no longer pray for the ground to open up and swallow me...!