Water woes

You may remember reading about our water irrigation group we organised in the village, last year in the spring (April 29, 2012 blog post) http://moo-oosings.blogspot.com/2012/04/water-was-running-today.html  we got hooked up to the irrigation line that runs near the village, and people were able to grow good gardens even during the dry summer. We have 14 participants who paid to hook into the line, buy a meter for their own hookup to our line, and the shared expenses to lay the pipe and put a meter where our water comes off the big line.  One of the neighbors went around to people on our street two years again in the summer, asked who wanted to sign up and collecting the initial fee for joining the group, so we could pay to put the line in. Garry ended up paying a little extra, of course, but we had a great garden last year.

When it came time to deal with the irrigation people, Victor ended up as the contact person to do so, none of the neighbors wanted their name on the contract, in case there was a big bill to pay someday. Every month in the summer he goes around reading meters and collecting the payment for how much water each participant uses. Last month there was 150 cubic metres of water that was metered coming out of the big line, that was unaccounted for when Victor collected money from everyone in the group. He just paid the extra, but this week when he did the math, there was 1000 to pay the company for, and 400 missing after he collected. Last October the guys had to fix a leak in the line so it wasn't costing everyone money, since the shortfall is a shared expense for the members.

Garry and Victor decided to walk the line on Tuesday and see if they could see a leak somewhere. As they were walking they saw a sprinkler going on a little alfalfa field. Garry says during the last six weeks of virtually no rain, it has been running a lot. It seemed the sprinkler might be hooked into our group's water line, so they went and turned off the main valve. The sprinkler wasn't running when they returned. They turned the valve back on, water came out again, they left someone to watch just to make sure, and it went off again when they closed the valve. They dug a hole and found where someone had tapped into our irrigation line as it went past their place.

Who did it? A guy who is rich for the village, no less, two cars in the driveway, his teenage daughter attended our Bible school last week. Victor, Garry and the rest of the group went to see him. Garry said he was smiling the whole time he insisted he didn't know it was their water line he had tapped into. Maybe he thought it was the villages? Unlikely. The village hooked their old waterline up last fall, during the election, a year after we organized our group, and charge more per cubic metre than we do.

 The man says he will pay for the water he used, and wants to join up (now that they found out, they want to charge him extra for hooking him up legitimately, since he was asked twice about joining) The story Garry heard the next day is it turns out he did not know the line was metered where it came off the company line, and thought he was just stealing from the water irrigation company instead of his neighbors. Victor says the guy is already hooked up to the village water, but decided to water his alfalfa....

Meanwhile, it is overcast today, on Wednesday there were rain storms around, but not more than a sprinkle fell on the village, even though I hung out two loads of laundry to dry! Most of it even dried that day, and the rest was dry by the next afternoon, even though we got a little rain in the evening. At least the pear tree over the clothesline has stopped dropping rotten pears on the clothes as they are drying, so I didn't have to rewash anything!

Sooner or later the normally wet fall should arrive. By the way this year we did not install drip irrigation in our garden, and with Garry going to Canada for two weeks, the garden did not get watered properly, so there has not been much to put in the freezer. The beets are nice though!