Water Water everywhere but none to drink!

Some of our best rental homes recently started to run very low on water. Water here is a precious resource and the infrastructure is not the best so the systems are vulnerable. Here is how it all works for these 5 houses.

The houses have roofs (duh I know) and they connect the gutters with downspouts into big concrete water tanks under the house called cisterns. That way the homes can collect rain water to then pump through the house for showers, sinks, toilets etc. Most places do not have enough roof area and storage capacity so they supplement rain water with well water. These houses work that way and so when the cistern gets low a float valve lets water from the local well supply into the tank. This water costs money usually about 2 cents a gallon but it varies depending on who your buying it from. From the cistern which is the reservoir of water waiting to be used for the house it goes out of the cistern into a pump and pressure tank then that regulates the pressure so you have a good stream coming out of the sinks, showers etc.

Well these 5 homes are very large and have 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms so they use a lot of water. We noticed that the cisterns were getting low as we have had little rain lately. It turned out that in the community of West end one of the two community wells had collapsed and there was basically no water pressure in the town and they were only running the water every so often doing the best they could to get some water to all people in the village.

These houses are on a point and kinda of the end of the line and they are up a little bit higher than the surrounding. Since the pressure was down they were not receiving any water to speak of. The water board was working on the problem but it takes time to get materials, money etc together and we had all 5 of these houses rented for Semana Santa (Easter week).

We had to do what we had to do which is order up the water trucks. The problem is these houses do not have a driveway to them. The closest place the truck could park is down the beach at the church so its about 347 feet to the first house and then each house is 50 or so feet apart.

It turns out on the island of Roatan between the water truck, local tool supply rental place and some PVC we had about 400 ft of line we could accumulate so we were able to pump water to the first two houses. We then would mark the cistern before and after each 1000 gallons (the amount the truck carries) and then when the truck left to go get more water we would pump it from house to house with another pump. We got about 10,000 gallons delivered this way over a few days.

We would have gotten more but the truck was in an accident with a motorcycle. No big deal right motorcycle small, truck huge how could that hold us up much? The bike had a cop on it so the truck was impounded, the guy in jail and that took about 7 hours to sort out so we lost almost a whole day just getting the driver and truck free. Don't worry it was like a bump no one was hurt and the Bike was not even really very damaged.

So we got the cisterns all about half full (4000 gallons in each of them). Believe it or not a 4 bedroom house uses about 400-800 gallons a day depending on number of people, how long they bathe, what they cook, if they wash clothes etc. Luckily for us a few days later it rained for a little while (first in a month) and the water board also got the well going and we started taking water again.

What did we learn from all of this? We decided to install low flow sink aerators and shower heads which are on order, we are investigating with some of the owners the cost feasibility of a solar powered desalination plant and we now tell customers to conserve and think about water usage because Water is no SPLASHING MATTER! ha ha I made that up do you like it?