If you've been reading here a (very) long time, you might remember that I used to do Audience Participation Days sometimes, wherein I ask a question of you. I'm going to do it again today, because, well, I have a question for you.
As you know, our pipes froze last week and we were without water for a few days. It was irritating, but not the end of the world. We knew the pipes would thaw sometime. Several of my co-workers and our neighbors had water issues too, so we could all commiserate together.
My family, however, was sort of horrified that we temporarily didn't have any water. It occurred to me that never once in my childhood or young adulthood had I ever been without water for longer than short power outages. Now it seems normal to me to sometimes go without running water for short periods of time, but that's because I've lived rurally for so many years.
So this is my question for you: Have you ever been without running water? For how long?
26 comments:
When I lived in my big house outside the city limits we frequently lost power, and since the well water depended on the pump to bring it in the house, we also lost water. I think the longest we ever went was 4 days. Because of this I always had about 12 gallons of water in the garage to use for flushing the toilets and a couple of cases of bottled water for drinking and cooking. The big difference with your family is that you don't live near a town where you can go to eat out, pick up bottled water, etc. We had relatives within 10 minutes and the entire north side of the town was within 5. I'll admit I am a city girl and don't do well with the lack of all of those modern amenities. :)
We have had pipes freeze, but we would only be without water for a few hours in one bathroom. I don't know how long i could go without running water- I think I'd be heading to a hotel if it was going to be out for days.
In recent memory we have not been without water or had pipes freeze. We live in suburbia.
- Monica
I have lived for 12 years without running water. You get used to. it and learn new ways.
Never when I was growing up, not even during the Blizzard of '78, but we were in suburbia.
As an adult: when the remains of Hurricane Ike came through our area, we were living in a house on a well, with an electric pump. We lost power and did not have running water for close to a week. Never lost water due to frozen pipes, just lack of electricity.
We've never been out, but need to prepare when hurricanes come through, never for cold. I'm more concerned about the pets and toilets than my husband and me. I have several options as far as bathing--there are showers at work and where I swim.
I live in a large city and have never been without water.
I have camped without water but only a few days at a time and we had buckets we could fill at a nearby pump and latrines we could use!
I have never had to live without running water. I have always lived in a location with a public water supply and even when we lose power there is still water pressure in the lines from the water tower. If the power goes out, the water company runs a generator to continue to pump water to the tower to maintain the pressure. The lines don't freeze because they are buried deep enough to be below the frost line. I think that's about 6 ft where I live in Maine. Now if we could just get the power company to bury the power lines, there would be fewer outages.
Pam in Maine
Everywhere I've lived, I have had the convenience of running water. Through the years I've done a lot of tent camping where we had to haul water, but since it was vacation, it was fun. As a child, I often stayed with relatives who technically had running water - one tap in the kitchen, but no bathrooms, just an outhouse. To avoid trips to the outhouse at night, each bedroom had a "chamber pot" which had to be emptied in the morning (pew!). I'm glad I got to experience life as my parents and the generations before them did. I think we take our modern conveniences for granted.
For me, hurricanes are the main reason for power and water disruption. No electricity means no water when you depend on a well. We filled the bathtubs for flushing toilets and had every available container with water for cooking. During Katrina we lived inland about 120 miles in a small town. Even though the town water was not supposed to be lost, a large tree fell on the emergency generator and the whole town was without. We were one of the few households who had thought about emergency water. Now we live in a very rural area and have a whole house generator but still make sure the tubs are full and we have emergency water just in case. P. S. For us, the worst part of power loss is loss of air conditioning on August or September!
K. in MS
We live in Florida and have been without water (due to hurricanes or storms) on multiple occasions. We have a well, so now electricity means no well pump, which means no water.
In 2017 we got hit badly by Hurricane Irma. I was 12 weeks pregnant with our daughter, and by the grace of God I'd gotten past the worst of the morning sickness about a week earlier. We had no power that time for a full week. A hot, miserable, sticky week.
Toilet flushing after a hurricane isn't terribly hard, as you simply take a bucket or pitcher into your flooded yard or ditch, get some nasty flood water, and flush your toilet. We've lived here long enough to have supplies and be prepared, so we fill lots of buckets and the tub, and we use that water for hand washing and, depending on the situation, sponge baths or dish washing.
Shortly after Irma we fixed the well pump so it can run off a generator, so once the storm passes and it's safe to emerge, we can have cold, untreated well water in the house. That makes a 100% difference, and our 4-day outage from Hurricane Ivan wasn't nearly as bad as the week with Irma.
Yes, w/o running water. Our first house we built. Til our well was drilled , we bathed in the creek ( YES it was cold even in summer)and carried potable water from the hydrant at the gas station /grocery store. 6 miles away,but on the way home from husband's work.
When our power was out different times here at this house been here since 88. Longest time was a week , maybe a little more power outage with either the hurricane (Ike)that came all the way to the ohio river valley or the bad ice storm that laid a lot of lines down. We always keep drinking water here in gallon vinegar jugs / flush toilet with buckets of water from the creek. Only used about a gallon of hot water to stand in tub and hand shower to get clean.
I live in a rural area, and when our children were young we lived in a very hard-to-heat little farmhouse. Our pipes froze more than once! We usually managed to get them thawed out & water running again within a couple days. Once our well pump quit working. My husband was sure he could fix it, so he tried for about 2 weeks before caving & buying a new one. In the meantime, he borrowed a water tank from his brother, so we had water just outside - but not running water that entire time. Since then we've built a new house on the property & never had pipes freeze, although the pump froze up once or twice & once the electrical at the pumphouse went out, so out of water again for a day or so. I always keep a few jugs of water in the pantry to be able to brush our teeth, etc., for emergencies. When I was a child, my grandparents did not have running water - we drew water from the well & brought it into the house.
Spent four years during college living in what we call a dry cabin, no electricity and no water and only a wood stove for heat. I was young, so hauling water in 5 gallon containers was not a big deal. The worst part was going to the outhouse when it was 20, 30, 40 or more below zero, in the dark and knowing that you could run across a moose. Now that I am old and spoiled by years of living with plumbing and electricity and oil heat, I can find myself whining if the water coming out of the hot water tap does not heat up fast enough for my impatient self. Now my chief inconvenience is that the spigot I use to get water to my garden is extremely cold so for the first month of gardening I fill 33 gallon trash cans and wait until the sun warms them up slightly and then water the young plants bucket by bucket full of the warmed water.
I live in a major US city. Some years ago a transformer blew/was damaged after a major summer storm, leaving the few city blocks it served without electricity for an extended time (about a week). I lived in a mid-rise (17 floors, I was on the 9th floor), so no electricity = no water. I had stored about 3 days worth of water on hand. (I also keep paper plates on hand and save all the free disposable silverware that comes my way for these times.) We could go out and buy water, but had to haul it up 9 long flights of stairs, which we did. I made sure to try to be gone as much as possible during the day, though.
I had been without power previously while growing up, when a pipe froze. Very glad for you that yours just froze and didn't freeze and then burst, as seems to be quite common. When that happened, we were without power for a day or so, waiting on a plumber to come replace the burst kitchen pipe. We learned that in very cold weather just opening a cabinet (to let heat in) and letting water drip is not enough -- need to let a thin stream of both hot and cold run to avoid freezing (I doubt this would have helped you, though, given your exposed under-the house pipes). Glad your water is back!
Our shallow well ran dry one summer when I was a child in rural Rhode Island. While waiting for the well to be made deeper we carried pails of water from a pipe in our neighbor’s woods and bathed in the river in front of our house. The pails were heavy but good practice for having animals when I was a little older.
Mikey
We currently live in a rural area that frequently loses electricity when the lines go down. For us, that means no well. I think the longest we've been without was maybe 2 days?
When I was almost 10 years old, our state experience significant flooding (Flood of '85). Although our home was high enough to be undamaged, we were without electricity and water for a while. I can't remember precisely for how long. The water treatment place had been flooded, and the river was contaminated by dead things and such. I remember the National Guard brought water and food in because roads were also washed out. I remember we didn't have grocery stores in town for awhile. And when we did get water back, we had to boil for a while, too.
The longest (self-inflicted) span of time without water was when I went camping/canoeing in Algonquin National Park in Canada for two weeks. We had to filter stream water to drink and cook with.
I grew up in Philadelphia (and want to change the spelling to 'wooder') and the longest we went without running water was three days during a tornado that ripped up the town. That was over 25 years ago now!
Interesting question. Interesting responses.
In the ice storm of January 2007, we were out of power (and thus no well) for 11 days. However, with livestock, we had to have something, so my husband borrowed a generator to run the well enough to get water to the cows (no mean trick at often 25 gallons a day per head). During the time he was pumping water tanks back full we also refilled the pressure tank, water heater and toilet tanks.
Thing is, people are neighborly, and so we had places to go for showers, toileting and hot food as needed. So that was good.
We travel for our work with a large park-type travel trailer (which means it doesn't have holding tanks for water), and we sometimes are overnight without water when we don't quite make it to our destination before stopping for the night. It's basically like camping without the excitement of being on vacation or the pleasure of a campfire. It's inconvenient and annoying -- you don't realize how often you wake up at 3 a.m. needing to use the restroom until your restroom is unavailable -- but very short term and therefore not the end of the world. The next day, we'll reach our destination, usually in the morning, and get the trailer set up, and showers and other water usage proceed as normal.
On a longer-term basis, we recently were without water at our (regular stationary) house for about 10 days because of a pipe break that flooded the basement. The water to the house was nonfunctional until the pipe was repaired. We drank bottled water, ate meals that required minimal preparation (sandwiches, canned soups, cereal) and ate out numerous times (we live 10 miles from a town of about 5,000, so nowhere near as remote as you, but it's not just running to McDonald's down the street) to cut down on the dishes. Some people skipped showers for extended periods, but I'm a pretty strict shower-at-least-every-24-hours person and I showered daily elsewhere after the first day. Basically, we made do. It was fine. Again, of course it was inconvenient and annoying, but we knew it was short term. It wasn't the end of the world.
--Karen.'s sister
I also live in a rural area and have a well, and need electricity to run the pump. So far we have never had frozen pipes but we are without electricity once a year or so. I think the longest was last summer - five days. We keep water in the basement and luckily we have a large creek where we can get water to flush the toilet. Last summer we took a bar of soap down there and washed (ourselves, not the laundry or the dishes)!
This whole very interesting chain makes me think about the unfortunate people who have deficient city water: Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, come to mind. I can't imagine how hard it is to raise children when the water is fouled by lead or any other substance. Having pure water may be the greatest luxury on earth.
Good question, and very interesting answers! Similar to many others, we're on a well, so we're out of water whenever the electricity goes out. The longest continuous stretch we had was 3 days, during a terrible ice storm. Boy howdy it was so cold (all electric, including heat) there was no chance I would have taken a shower anyway! But my crazy hair and I were so grateful when the power came back on.
I spent much of my life drawing from the well of our house. (think old Chinese movie). I did not enjoy indoor running water until I was 13 years old. The worst I evet had to do was chip the bucket from the rail and beat the ice from the rope. lol
We live on the border between suburban & rural and keep our horses further out. The longest we've been without water at the house is 4 days, with power out for about 98% of that time and temps well below freezing. We live close enough that I was able to drive to town once a day for hot food and we have a fireplace so I could put the camping kettle in there and have hot water. The "frost free" spigot at the horse barn freezes a couple times a year and I have to haul water in large camping style jugs for the animals there.
As a kid I lived in a very small village in northeast Ohio in the late 70’s/ early 80’s that at least once a winter had water main breaks and we were without water for several days. We used melted snow to flush toilets and boiled it to use it for cleaning dishes….
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