I was washing my hands this morning: water on, wet hands, water off, soap, lather, lather, lather, water on … But the water didn’t come back on. Suddenly nothing came out of the tap. Cold. Or hot. Or the kitchen tap. Or the outside taps for the garden hose. We were dry.
I wiped my still soapy hands on the towel, then strolled out to the footpath. There was nothing amiss that I could see. No sign anyone had been tinkering with the toby.
I consulted the City Council website, with no success. I couldn’t find a section where they warn residents about work going on. Finally I rang the Council, to learn that Yes, there was a planned water outage between 9 am and 1 pm.
It may have been planned, but we weren’t told about it.
It was darned inconvenient. I happened to have enough water in a jug to make a couple of cups of tea, but what really got to me was that I couldn’t wash my hands after removing a biddy bid from my dog’s moustache, or before making a sandwich for lunch.
Luckily, as responsible dog owners who pick up after their dogs have pooped on walks, we have some of that alcohol-based hand cleaner in the house. I find I don’t trust it though: give me soap and water. Still, it had to do.
Around 5 hours later the water came back, finally. I’d had enough of doing without it.
Which made me realise a few things:
- Our neighbour has a nice big swimming pool. If there’s a disaster that wipes out the water supply at least we could tap into his pool for washing purposes, and I guess at a pinch if the water was well-boiled, we could drink it too.
- This half-day without water was really inconvenient and annoying for me. Billions of people live without (clean) water that comes out of a tap. How spoiled I am.
- charity: water needs help from all of us who are spoiled for water:
Right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us.
charity: water is a non profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. We give 100% of the money raised to direct project costs, funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need. Just $20 can give one person in a developing nation clean water for 20 years.
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