No Water!

We have not had city water coming in for the last 4 days. We thought we'd been careful, filling the baptismal font on Thursday and Friday when a little trickled in. Then Saturday we had a branch meeting and lots of activity at the church as well as the baptism. Hmm. The water in the lower tank was very low. We turned off the pump so we wouldn't loose all the water on Sunday.

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All the upper tank water was used on Sunday and we had about ten inches remaining in the lower tank. We turned on the pump. Alas, we did not check to make sure all the faucets were off throughout the rest of the church and so some of our precious water escaped. There is just a smidgen in the upper tanks. So we have resorted to scooping from the font for our needs now-- including flushing all four of the Church toilets.

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So when you have a lemon, you make lemonade right? We'd been planning to clean the bottom water tank. What better time to do it than when it's empty.

Our mighty hero preparing for the feat! Note the tank is taller than he is. We did put a stool inside so here he is entering.

Sludge had collected below the exit pipe-- at least 8 inches. As Tom lowered the stool and it kept sinking, that we realized how deep it was. First Tom stood on the stool and scooped. This is what came out. Note the bottle cap floating in the water.

After surveying the project and dumping 6-8 buckets and seeing the water go down only a few inches. We decided to call in reinforcements. Note the arm with the empty bucket belongs to our intrepid hero. Elder Lipengah and Elder Hays formed a chain to dump full buckets and return the empty ones.

As you see our hero hard at work getting the sludge, note the color of the walls.

Elder Lipengah then volunteered to climb in and scrub the tank. They'd cleaned their tanks recently and were experts. He did an outstanding job. As I looked over the top, I could feel the heat coming up from the tank-- and this was pretty early in the morning. We'd started at 7am.

You can't see the beads of sweat on his face, but he got the tank cleaner than I thought possible!

When we called for help, they raced right over, even before breakfast. So I cooked French toast for breakfast for us all... or maybe it was brunch by then.

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Here's the irony. They, too, have been having water problems and have almost no running water. We all got pretty dirty cleaning the tank. But did we have water for a bath? For washing clothes? Sure! If we wanted to use a bucket! And in truth, a bucket of water is SO much better than no water at all.