April 30, 2006 — Our town has been without water for almost a week.

We’ve heard various rumors:

  • One pump is out… no, it’s two pumps that are out, one on the west side of town and another one.
  • It will be fixed tomorrow (which is a holiday). It won’t be fixed soon.
  • They took a pump to Guadalajara (less than an hour away and Mexico’s second-largest city) but it didn’t get fixed and had to be sent to Guanajuato (a small city several hours away). This seems odd to me, but then rumors often do.
  • The parts of the town at higher elevations are without water because there’s not enough pressure… or the whole town of 5000 people is out.

So what do people do in a case like this? The small city of Jocotepec, which is the equivalent of the county seat for our town of San Juan Cosala, has been sending over water trucks. My guess is that people here know how to make do with way less water when they have to, even if it means dirtier clothes, etc. Virtually everyone has a water tank on their roof.

Kelly and I are among the wealthy when it comes to water. Our new tinaco, or black water tank at the top of our quarter-acre, is an extra-large one, holding 2500 liters which is 660 gallons. At the bottom of our land we have an aljibe or inground water tank, which can hold a lot of water. We don’t know how much, but we guess about 10 times the tinaco. Of course, we do have to have electricity to pump up to the tinaco, but that’s been on all week. Well, except for two five-minute interludes.

As a further backup, we have the swimming pool, which we estimate holds about 11,000 gallons.

We normally do almost all the watering of our gardens and lawns directly from the town water system. We let it go till today, except for a little hand-watering, but many plants looked really thirsty so Kelly hooked up our hoses to each other and watered everything that needed it, not including the lawns. He was encouraged that he only used about 300 gallons.

Also, yesterday a Mexican friend told us about someone he knows in Jocotepec who has a water truck and sells water. We may get a load for the aljibe, which is currently about half full.

Water is about as basic as you can get!