Water issues
Living in our little rural community in the mountains, we don’t have many choices for over the air radio stations, the mountains block most if not all of any potential signals we might receive, in fact for us, our only choice is Marfa Public Radio, it’s in the next town over and the only reason we can receive the signal is they installed a repeater tower on the edge of our neighborhood a few years ago.
Over the weekend I heard a story about California’s drought and folk running out of water, their wells are going dry and many in those communities, especially in the outlying areas are not on city water services. They are receiving 2500 gallon water tanks to get them through this terrible time. What really caught my attention though was the statement that this amount of water would last an average family 2 weeks, 2 WEEKS! I was shocked to hear that stat, it is a testament to how much water is apparently wasted by the people in their ordinary day to day usage.
One guy they interviewed stated that his well would run dry after 15 minutes, he was watering his lawn when he discovered this, well I’d say if you only have 15 minutes of water at a time, stop watering your lawn, it seems like a no brainer to me.
We live in a desert climate here in far west Texas, we have a rainy season which we are in now, it lasts a few months, we get random rain the rest of the year but it’s not much. Some of the people in my neighborhood have wells, but the vast majority of the people out here use tanks and haul their water. Most of us use a 1550 gallon water tank, one single tank, a few have 2 or more tanks, but most have just one. On average, those tanks are filled about once a month, our local water delivery guy has an 1100 gallon tank on his truck, so the tanks aren’t filled 100%, they try to not let their tank get down to empty before calling for a refill, so you could say that the average family out here uses about 1000 gallons per month (+/-).
What is the difference here? Are we going without to save water? I’d say no, what we are doing is living with the amount of water we have, we don’t water lawns, we don’t take long showers, many of us don’t take daily showers, we don’t leave the water running when we aren’t using it, we stop leaks as soon as possible after discovering them, some of us have composting toilets so we aren’t flushing water down the toilet. Many of us use our water more than once, ie we have grey water systems that at the very least water trees, gardens and …
