The temperature dropped to 11 at one point where i was at and it wasn’t a quick dip. It was a prolonged under 20 degrees for a whole day type of scenario. I knew it was coming. I read the forecast. I understood that it would be a miracle against nature if i didnt lose all the water in my well after it busted while i was two cities away at work. I understood the danger and i wanted to stay home. However, this was not an option. This was not an option because i wasn’t playing the role of little old prn me…i was covering for a full time employee who was on maternity leave after having a beautiful healthy baby. Praise the Lord. My prayers were answered. The baby was here and healthy and gorgeous. Now it was my job to hold down the fort at work so she could have some time to take care of and bond with that new baby and i whole-heartedly wanted to do that to the best of my ability. I wore a face mask the whole time to make sure there was as little chance as possible of me not being able to fulfill this duty to its end, in spite of the constant and numerous protests by employees and patients who found the presence of the mask triggering. I chose practicality over appeasing the masses. This was important. They would just have to be bothered. However, when i saw the forecast i cried. I knew i would be forced to choose between my well and work, and i couldnt not choose work because it wasnt my work and my patients that i’d be neglecting…it was hers. i tried to damage control the situation. I picked the day that was supposed to have precipitation in the twenties and asked if i could have that day off and come in saturday instead to make up for it. It was still going to be in the twenties on saturday so i wasnt sure what this plan of mine was but i had two problems to deal with. The well, an uninsulated sparse wood frame covered in drafty sheets of tin, was going to bust and also my car wasnt going far on the slick sheet of ice the asphalt was about to become. So i pushed the problem down the road. However, i knew, in every fiber of my being, with 3 solid days where the temperature was well below freezing, i was not going to get away with the well not busting. I was given permission to switch the week day out for saturday but after that i couldn’t switch any more days. Sunday was a new week. That meant whoever i didnt see was in danger of having their treatments re-evaluated by insurance. I was extremely frustrated because i knew disaster was coming and i just had to stand there like a mannequin on the train tracks and let it hit me. After the well busted, made a geyser, and emptied itself all over my property and down the road to the intersection during an entire work day while i was two cities away and unable to return until sundown…everyone seemed surprised. They texted me, “hey so how’s your well? Everything good?” It was so clear to me, and i perhaps just dont do a good job of communicating how uninsulated this well house is, but it was clear to me from the beginning that there was a zero percent chance this thing wouldnt bust. There were 2 heat lamps on in the well house at the time that it busted. It just doesnt matter. Some drafty ill fitted tin pulled together around a concrete square with a pump and some tanks sitting on it will not do at 11 degrees. I had gone to the store and grabbed pipe insulation tubes, electric tape, and caulk. I had caulked as much of the spaces between the metal sheets as i could. I had taped the tubes on whatever i could reach. It was just a useless effort. This was not an insulated well house. It wasnt going to work. I was sour in response to everyone’s obligatory “hey you’re good right?” texts as i had been clear that my situation was not going to be able to withstand the weather coming and they either didnt hear me or didnt believe me and thought i was overreacting. Everyone was shocked to learn that my well had busted and i was doing bird baths with water bottles and pooping in a bucket. But the part i was most sour about was that since it was not my usual caseload but a full time one, i was unable to return to my homestead until sundown, which meant my well f******* emptied for hours and hours as a geyser and covered my property in a sheet of ice. The ice river extended down to the intersection and yet not one neighbor or passerby bothered to come turn off the electricity to my well house in the adjacent breaker box. They just drove past it. It is my only source of water. I cant afford a holding tank and i cant afford to buy water in in trucks. Water is life. I felt that people who could turn on the tap and have water come out for 100 years no problem minimized the gravity of what i was saying when i said i live alone. No one is here to check on any of this. I need to be with my homestead to run damage control when this thing busts. However, i also understood i had accepted a responsibility when i agreed to cover my coworker’s maternity leave. If i was acting as her, if i didnt show up it meant she didnt show up, and it would reflect badly on both of us. Aware that i couldnt pay for the homestead if i didnt have a job, i chose the job. The well busted. I wasnt there. It emptied a lot of water from the earth. I had to find a plumber fast. My neighbor and best friend came through for me. Her student’s father was a plumber and she called him at 8:30 at night. Because of this, i got an appointment in hours before the bandera electric grid failed and half of my town also lost their wells; the key difference being that they were home to turn the electricity to their wells off. I may be a bit resentful about this because everyone i work with is married and they all have someone at home at all times who can manage disasters in their absence and they seem to think i should be in this boat and there is no difference between our situations. I am less available because my situation is different. But in this situation i did not have the option to be less available so i fulfilled our work duties and lost hours and hours of gushing precious water that still guts me when i think about it. Every time i open my eyes the first morning prayer i start with now is “Lord please let the well not be dry.” The river has two inches of water in it versus no inches. That does not make a problem fixed. One year rain. Three years drought. That is the cycle. Except this time the Guadalupe river went dry. So we’re starting the three years drought with a couple inches water to last us through. How is that going to work? Its not. Its not a matter of if but when our wells are going dry, depending on how deep they are and where the water level is in our area. My well is 250 feet down. I know people who had their wells run dry in fredericksburg last year and they were 800 feet down. It depends on where you are and how many people are also using your aquifer for their wells, but no one can afford to get cocky. The water situation here is not fixed. Just cuz it sprinkles once a week now…i mean i’ll take it, but its no flood.
The plumber fixed my busted well. He’s a great plumber. I wish he wasnt moving. Id love to keep him as my go to plumber. Anyways, i realized work was not going to be cool with me staying home every time there was winter weather. I needed to get someone out and spend the thousands of dollars it was going to take to redo the well house, cuz this wasn’t it. This was not working for anybody. The first hurdle was going to be that i was probably not going to be able to easily take time off to oversee this project because while covering for a full time employee, i would have to get prn in to take my place if i needed time off, and i was the only prn.
I will say this. For all the “just checking on you” texts i got, there was one coworker, a speech therapist, and one neighbor (my best friend) who let me shower at their houses and brought me bottled water, which was invaluable because i not only had to feed myself water but had to provide water for my dogs, chickens, and fruit trees. All the fruit trees that were living before the freeze are currently still living. Im proud of that. I got a cherished hot shower with imported italian shampoo and soap at my neighbor’s house. I appreciated those who helped me but nothing and no-one was going to take away the image of my entire property coated in a flat sheet of slick ice. I had to sit down and scoot on my butt to get to the door that first day. I was so down when i got to the box and turned the electricity off that i just didnt have it in me to photograph anything. It was dark. I was depressed. I left my things in the car which i had to leave parked outside the property gate, and just covered myself in the blanket in bed. I failed. It was not a good day. Even now my memories of the event are choppy and disjointed and its because some part of me wants to block the whole thing out and file it in the drawer of “things which did not happen”. Its rare an event happens that i cannot mentally handle to look at. This is that. I cannot mentally handle the fact that i emptied my well to an extent unknown and i will not know until disaster is achieved and one day i turn the knob and no liquid comes forth. I cant blame it on work. I had a legitimate job to do and they had reason to expect me to be there. I cant blame it on me. I did everything in my power to make it warmer in there with what i had at my disposal. It was just one of those situations i could not win. So i lost.
the plumber fixed the well house in time for it to warm into the mid thirties and melt the ice. Then it plummeted straight back down to 20. I of course was in the well house contemplating how i was going to keep what happened from happening again with newly repaired pipes that barely had the glue dry on them. I contemplated turning the power off to the well house and opening the spigots but this would ruin the fancy softener tanks i was going to be paying on for 4 additional years that kept the well from being full of sulfur and iron. The water that came out while the softeners were offline was brown. Not drinkable. So, save the pump or the softener but you cant have both…was the message. I was standing in the well house on the phone wrapped in my down comforter asking if i spent the night out there in the well house would my body heat generated be enough to keep the well house from being freezing enough to bust the pipes again. I couldnt put the chickens in because they’d try to eat the wires in there but i started contemplating what it would look like to try to get a few of them in there with me. It would be a mess. They’d get behind things where i couldnt reach them. They’d poop all over everything. They’d rip at the softener wires. I’d never get them all out of there in time to leave for work…id have to go into work really late in the day because i couldnt open the door to come out before the temperature was above freezing. What if i needed to pee? I dragged the down comforter and the home depot winter toilet bucket in the well house with me and stood in between the softener tanks and the well pump. There was just enough room for me, the blanket, and the bucket. I couldnt figure out what i was going to do with the blanket when i needed to use the bucket and where the bucket lid was going to go when i took it off. I wondered if iphones were okay to freeze. The well house creaked and crackled each time the wind blew the tin sheets back and forth. I could feel the wind coming in and hitting my skin. It was cold. The softener technician on the phone said my body heat and a down comforter would not be enough to heat the well house. He gave me the patronizing advice to leave all the animals put and check myself into a hotel where they had warm running water and television and nice comfy beds. He said for me to just excuse myself from the situation and rest my little head and not stress about anything anymore. I told him to go **** himself. I was crying because my well emptied all over the property and down to the intersection the day before and it was about to do it again and i was beyond frustrated that in spite of all my trying there was nothing i could do to prevent it. I was calling for advice, not to be patronized and coddled. I wasn’t a fragile flower who could not handle my homestead. In fact, if i was able to stay on the homestead, id have handled it. There was this problem called “i have to leave every morning and then no humans are here” that was throwing a monkey wrench into everything. And his solution was for me to leave voluntarily before i had to? Wholey unhelpful. I spent a good five minutes after i hung up cursing the softener company and their view of me as some fragile thing that needed relieved of responsibility. Then i put my big girl pants on and dug an additional heat lamp socket out of the shed. The field mice had completely chewed through the insulation around the cord. I went to the house and got the electrical tape. I wrapped the entire length of the cord in electrical tape, hoping to escape the plight of fires and electrocution. I stood on a chair to get to the top of the fridge where i had an extra heat lamp bulb at all times just in case the current one burned out before i was able to get to town and buy another in cold weather. I screwed that in to the older chewed up socket that had been in the shed. I ran back to the shed and detangled about 1000 feet of extension cord in order to free up a 500 ft one for use. Every time i went in the shed the wind ripped the door out of my hands and flung it into the support beam of the shed porch which i found really annoying but i had other disasters that were more frontal in my mind so i’d have to be upset about that at a later date in time. I plugged the extension cord into the side outlet on the house and ran it up to the well house. I plugged in the heat lamp i had rigged with electrical tape and was not electrocuted. I laid the additional heat lamp on the floor of the well house. Then i closed the door on the cord and taped wads of tape against the areas of weather strip that were held open by the extension cord. Now there was one heat lamp on the well pump, one heat lamp on the back pipes behind the pump, and one heat lamp in the socket near the ceiling with the broken pull cord that was irrelevant because there was a light switch. I went in the house and stared at the well house through the window, straining my eyes to check for signs of moisture escaping down the side of the cement foundation. The plumber had told me if i couldnt think of anything else to do, in order to save the pump and the softeners, i could just stream the water faucets instead of drip them. I opened the faucets to a small but steady stream. I left them like that all night. It killed me to do so; wasting precious water right after spilling so much. But, it was the only way. The well house made it till morning. I waited until it was 33 degree to leave the house. I didnt go in to work until 11 am. I wasnt making the same mistake i did last time. I was going to be there if the well busted again. When it was 33 degrees outside i opened the door to the well house to check. With all 3 heat lamps on it was 33 degrees in the well house. I unplugged the taped heat lamp, worried it would start a fire in my absence. I picked up a new spare metal heat lamp socket on the way home that day. I left the other heat lamps on, closed the door, and went to work. I had to overlap a few patients, which our job does allow us to do to a certain percentage, but in the end i stayed late and got everybody seen. Just because we can do it doesnt mean every patient will be willing and several patients expressed that they were not willing to see me if they did not have my undivided attention, so i stayed late and saw those patients individually. Your elderly dementia patients, tbi patients and stroke victims are not going to have any sympathy for whatever disaster you were managing at home. They live in the moment and their world exists within the facility walls.
I drove home and began looking for construction companies or handymen that would be willing to redo the well house. I needed it insulated, to the umpteenth degree. All the insulation in the world…i wanted it in there. I needed someone who understood the assignment; Insulate.
I have never seen the stock tank freeze solid but at 11 degrees it became one big oval shaped ice cube.
Of course the fountain at work made an ice sculpture and died again.
The no good, low down, inadequate and extremely frustrating tin well house.