My week has been about water. The village acequia (irrigation ditch) and the village drinking-water cooperative, two essential utilities in this rural agricultural village on the edge of the great prairies of eastern New Mexico.
Ditch-cleaning proceeds. There is a huge earthmoving machine parked in my yard for the weekend, courtesy of Guadalupe County, which will work for us next week. I've been getting things ready to accommodate it. Everybody feels embarrassed if a $100k machine sits there idling while nobody quite knows exactly what to do with it. OTOH, only such a beast is capable of getting a 4 foot diameter cottonwood trunk as long as a small car out of the ditch.
The good news is that everybody is totally cooperative on this. Most people seem to be relieved that there is SOMEBODY even pretending to know what they are doing in addressing what needs to be done. The bad news is that I am winging it, learning as I go. I do seem to have fairly unlimited authority to drive into anybody's place and look at the acequia and let them know we are coming through. I generally don't have to mention that this process has been going on for around 175 years concerning this particular acequia, a relative youngin' amongst the old ones up North.
And then, in the midst of all this, I finally snap to the situation and realize we have a major problem with the village drinking-water system. The office person points out that the electric bill is suddenly 50% higher this month, and I have gotten a couple of calls from Connie, who always notices low water pressure first, her house being about the highest uphill in the village.
A quick check of the meter tells me I am getting 1/3 of normal input water to our 60k gallon storage tank up on the hill, while a glance at the electric meter down by the well-head, 2000 feet away from the tank, shows me the KWHs just spinning on by. So i know all this by about 8am Thursday.
I actually know exactly what to do: call GG, who happens to be a County Commissioner for Guadalupe County. Now let me tell you; you have to go to Mississippi to find a County this poor and funky. Few people, and pretty folksy. So GG knows me when I call and after shooting the bare minimum of shit about County politics, I ask him to ask his dad, George, to come over and look at our well. George has been servicing deep wells his whole life out here, and he's older than I am, and I'm gonna be 66 in two months. He shows up this (Friday) morning driving the pump-derrick truck, with a helper who might be his grandson, but I didn't inquire. He has come about 50 miles in his rig. The derrick assembly is probably over 40 years old, mounted on a truck that is at least 20 years old, but George operates it like a master organist in an ancient cathedral.
So we're talking about a HUD-spec well that serves more than 100 families and has a $6k pump that sucks 45 amps of 220V juice 400 feet down a 2/3 WG Well service-grade underwater cable. 10 horse pump, puts out 32 GPM lifting about 800 feet between the depth of the well and the top of our tank. Serious business.
So up goes the derrick. George just happens to have, somewhere on a keyring that must have had 100 small brass keys, THE key that opened the lock on the wellhead. (major relief, because I sure as fuck don't know where it is.)
400 feet of 2 inch steel pipe later, the last 20-foot section of pipe emerges, and joy, joy!!!, we find a hole about the size of a thin pencil in the delivery pipe, corroded by 5 years of immersion in our mineralized water. I saw this pump and pipe go in this well new when it was last repaired. This was what we had been hoping to see, rather than see that the pump had failed.
We saw, before starting, that the pump was drawing 56 amps, and the meter seemed to be spinning faster that normal. Most of the energy, 2/3 of it, was being wasted by the failed pipe dumping the water back down the well, rather than delivering it up the hill. After George put it all back together with 2 new sections of pipe he had brought along (did I mention he is experienced?) the current draw was back down to 44 amps and the well was back to delivering the normal 32 GPM. This is by 4pm Friday. Local at its best. George will send us a bill, and the community won't even notice anything happened.
In a minute here I am going to venture out after dark and check the tank. If it's filled, I'll turn off the back-up well and pump we have been running on since yesterday, as the main well/pump should be sufficient. We have kept the old well and pump and tank alive and viable for these emergencies since the whole system was rebuilt back in 1996.
We, this unincorporated rural village, were given this system as an outright grant of about a half-million dollars, back in the flush Clinton years, and since then our cost to maintain it and keep it going amounts to about 80 cents per family per day, although we are having trouble making ends meet due to a high rate of delinquencies of payments from our members. Times are tough out here. There are tough decisions having to be made that I, an unpaid volunteer, don't relish making. I have some sense of backing by the community, but that actually represents the less than 25% of the membership that actually showed up to form a quorum to deal with these issues.
All of that is independent of my role as mayordomo of the acequia, which is an entirely different matter, although some of the players are the same.
Stay tuned; it's real life...