Monday, June 30, 2014

Lot's of rain, but no water in the pipes

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the government is widening the road by our house.  The road widening is starting from where the Autopisa is east of Codallos market and supposedly going to Tacambaro. That is what the huge signs say on the side of the construction sites.
Last week I noticed that they had a backhoe opening up the side of the road in several places North of our house, between Corazon de Durazno and town. The big holes that they were opening up are for the concrete bridges that they are forming which the new roadbed will rest upon.

As they opened up the large holes I also noticed that they had cut several pipes that were located under neat the side of the roads, on both sides. Some of the pipes were still spewing quite a bit of water, so it was safe to assume that they had not notified the powers at be to shut off that or those pipes.
Later on that day, I noticed some more pipes at another excavation that were cut, the one closer to our house and right next to Corozon de Durazo subdivision.
Checking the next day, I discovered that we were no longer getting any water in our main tank that is fed from the aqueduct that feeds all the rest of the pipes.

So what do we do now?

It will be foolish to think that we can simply find our pipe and run a bypass around where the road people cut it, because obviously the main feed has been turned off which supplies the 4 inch main that we feed off of. The same main that also feeds the two cisterns next to the road that Corazon de Durazno use for their water.
So.....
It looks like we cannot rely on any  municipal water for quite awhile.  So what options do we have?  Many years ago when we had an interruption in our supply we simply called the water truck to fill our main tank. The trucks tank although large would only fill the tank about half way up. From what I remember it was around 250 pesos at that time to have the truck come by. I am sure it has at least doubled.

Since we had new gutters put in a few weeks ago, I decided that the rain run off from our roof is going to be our supply at least for the next 3 or 4 months. It probably will take the road guys at least 5 or 6 months to finish the road before we will know how and where everyone is going to be running their pipes and hoses. So today we went to the hardware store and purchased all the parts we need to connect our gutters to the main tank below our house that we use to gather the water from the municipal supply.
Judging from the amount of water that we see come through the gutters, I think the rainy season will keep all our tanks full for the next several months.

The big question is how will that Corazon de Durazon subdivision with 24 or so homes make do, especially since their tanks are way above the homes, the homes which some of are rentals so the tenants have no idea of who or whom to call , and the other half of the homes are owned by Gringos who already fall apart at the slightest inconvenience in anything, especially something like this.

It appears that they will be building another 3 or 4 more underpass bridges like above on the way our property, so instead of trying to figure out a bypass we will just live with fresh rainwater.
That was the plan for sometime in the future anyway....this will be a good test.

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