People who live in urban areas are often accused of not knowing where their food comes from. They often think that water just comes out of the faucet, without really thinking about its source. Rural people usually feel a lot closer connection to the sources of their food and water. I felt that close connection on Friday when Joan turned on the tap in the kitchen and discovered that our water pressure was rapidly dropping.
We had been getting some heavy rain, and that coupled with the fact that the snow on the mountain tops was melting had caused all the creeks in the Robson Valley to really start to gush. Highway 16 east of McBride, was forced to close for most of a day, when a mudslide from an overloaded creek came washing across the highway. It always seems a bit illogical to realize that with all this water running everywhere, we had lost water in our house.
I walked up to Sunbeam Falls, which is the source of our water, to try to discover what the problem was. So much water was roaring and pouring over the falls, that I was not able to get close to the culvert where our water system intake is located to do anything. You can sort of see our culvert in the middle of the photo just below the big brown boulder.
Saturday morning, a neighbor and I went back up to the falls and found that the run on the creek had slowed considerable, and we discovered the source of our problem-- our culvert had completely filled with gravel, which prevented any water from getting into our waterline. We have a watergate on the lower side of our culvert, and by opening that, we got the gravel in the culvert to be washed out by the water, and once all the gravel was out, and we closed the watergate, we got our household water back.
Visit my website to see my paintings: www.davidmarchant.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment