We have water!

Well, sort of. We have a hole in the ground with water in it. The pump has yet to be installed.

The hole in the ground with the water in it is under the white bucket behind the drill rig. The well driller will be back later today to pick up his equipment. I'm not sure just when they'll start the pump installation. The State of Michigan requires that the water from any new well be tested by the local health department before it can be connected to a household plumbing system. When they do install the submersible pump, they'll trench over to the old pump house (concrete block building with the blue tarp on it), install the pressure tank there, and complete various other tasks that should result fairly soon in the magical sound of a toilet being flushed.

It's a sound we haven't heard for awhile; our existing well decided to stop producing earlier this summer. The treks to the outhouse, the necessary, the little brown shack out back, haven't been particularly onerous -- it is July, the days are long, there is no snow on the ground-- although serving as a buffet for mosquitoes isn't my favorite way to start a day. July, will, however, not last indefinitely. Hence, the new well.

Our problem, unlike those poor saps in the desert southwest or California suffering from drought and dropping water tables, was not a lack of water under the sod. Our problem was too much fine sand and clay. Our old well is a driven point; the point kept getting clogged with sand, clay, biofilms (there's a lot of iron in the local water; iron attracts bacteria that form scale), whatever. The S.O. would manage to clear the point, the well would produce copious amounts of water for a while -- days, weeks, months -- and then the gusher would slow down. We'd go from having gallon after gallon pouring out of the faucet to measuring the flow in quarts and then cups before the water pressure dropped to nil. So then the S.O. would clear the point again, using techniques ranging from pulling it completely to the classic firing of a .22 into the pipe. That last one yielded good results that lasted about two days. That's also the one that made me decide it was time to call the well driller. When you're desperate enough to try to kill your well, it's time to bring in the professionals.

We live in a part of the U.P. that is notorious for well drillers having to pound through several hundred feet of granite to find water. We didn't think that was going to happen here -- despite being close to the highest point in Michigan, we're sitting on a pile of glacial till -- and we were right. We were reasonably confident they'd manage to hit legal water (more than 25 feet down) without having to go through any real rock. Our optimism was warranted: end result is a well 32 feet deep with 26 feet of casing and 6 feet of stainless steel sand screen.

I'm not sure exactly how long we'll have to wait for the pump. Because there's paperwork involved, it could be within a day or two; it could be a couple of weeks. But I can live with that. As long as there isn't frost on the outhouse seat, I can cope with the early morning hike to the privy.

A small digression: a few days ago there was a quiz bouncing around on Facebook that asked if a person could handle living in the Victorian era. A number of people commented that the one thing they couldn't deal with was the idea of using an outhouse. I had two thoughts at the time. One was "Welcome to my world." The other was if I was unlucky enough to live in the 19th century, I'd worry a heck of a lot more about the availability of clean drinking water and the lack of antibiotics than I would about not being able to piss into porcelain.

The slide toward third world status continues

Thunderstorms rolled through DeKalb County last night. Trees fell on houses, lightning zapped various locations. . . and today big chunks of DeKalb County, aka the east side of Atlanta, have no safe drinking water. One lightning strike, and water purification is shot to hell for hundreds of thousands of people for . . . who knows? Apparently the indefinite future. The county still has the advisory up on its website. Cynic that I am, I can't help but think that if a simple thunderstorm manages to wipe out the water supply, just imagine what a determined evil-doer could achieve -- Tommy Thompson, never one of my favorite politicians, actually worried about stuff like the vulnerability of food and water supplies back during his brief tenure as Secretary for Health and Human Services. Guess he spent too much time worrying about stuff we could actually fix, though, and not enough time stroking egos in Washington, because he was in and out of the Bush administration pretty quickly.

In any case, Large Nameless Agency promised earlier today to bring in bottled water so we hard-working government employees won't have to worry about dehydration. Given that most of the bottled water around here also comes from the Chattahoochee, I'm not sure passing out bottles of Dasani is the ideal solution. (Not that any had appeared by the time I left work this afternoon; they'll probably delegate the task to FEMA and the water will end up shipped to Iowa.)

I'm anticipating an abnormally number of people calling in "sick" on Friday. After all, an intestinal bug sneaking through from the Chat is going to take a day or two to make itself known -- but when it does, I'm sure the enteric disease experts I work with will have all the symptoms nailed.

If I wasn't so thirsty I'd do a longer rant about poor engineering and failing infrastructure, but instead I think I'll just wander across the street and see just what kind of beer the Citgo sells.