roughing it....sort of

My apartment building currently has no water, the landlady is on vacation in the US, and the people who are supposed to be watching over the house while she's gone don't seem to be able to do anything to help us. We are currently suspecting that we have a leak somewhere...a massive leak that caused us to lose probably over 5000 gallons of water in 24 hours. We had no water a couple days ago, the water guy came to refill our tanks (with two tankers full of water) and then we were out of water again the next day!

Fortunately, after two days of taking showers in the pool (I figure chlorine is better than nothing) and brushing my teeth with bottled water, I remembered we have a rainwater cistern and decided to figure out how to use it. After turning some valves and knobs, I finally figured it out, turned the pump back on, and managed to get us water. We have no idea how much is in there, how long it will last, or where the leak is, but it was at least enough for all of us to take a shower, wash dishes, and fill toilets. We've decided that in order to make it last (because who knows when they'll actually fix the plumbing), we go turn the pump on and off every time we need to use water. It rained pretty hard last night, so that should have re-filled the cistern to its normal level, whatever that may be. Hopefully, it will continue raining at night so that we don't run out of water again!

I'm currently taking bets on how long it will take to get fixed. My guess is not before finals next Saturday. For whoever lives here when I'm gone, I've made a handy little map for you, so you can have water too.


Edit: After more investigating (I should be a detective) we discovered that we actually have 2 tanks of freshwater and one rainwater cistern. It's just that, for some reason, one of the two tanks has always been full, but turned off. So, we've now got one empty main tank, one nearly full main tank (which we're currently using) and one full rainwater tank, which we can use if we really go a long time without water! I think we'll last until the problem is fixed.