Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Wednesday, November 07, 2007 1:37:00 PM
November 7, 2007 -- Briefly last week appeared a story about a very small town (145) in Tennessee that only has 3 hours of water per day, which they have trucked in and which is turned on and off by their mayor. The stories about this group of sad folk disappeared very quickly, as their efforts to live on 3 hours of water per night were revealed to be quite a bit short of Heroic.
As the water flowed at 6:00 p.m. each night, the story related, the townspeople turned on their dishwashers. Stop me if I am wrong here, but if your town is perishing for lack of water, wouldn't washing the dishes in a dishpan be a more rational use of a scarce resource? After all, the water in the dishpan could then be emptied onto the garden or used to flush the commode, couldn't it?
Same thing with the townfolk who leap to run the daily washing machine load. In days of yore, people had two or three outfits, one off, one on, and one to sleep in. These outfits were hand washed in a tub and dried in the air. For those kids who can't get the idea of wearing clothes more than once before tossing them in the hamper, a turn at the washtub would soon change their thinking. Again, the water in the tub can be used to water the garden or swish out the commode when done with its primary use.
It was also mentioned that everybody jumped into the shower (individually, one would assume, although the Sixties had another suggestion in that regard). Now, in the Fifties when all those Mental Hygiene movies came out that we got to see at school, we were told that it was necessary to bathe or shower once a week. People of the Fifties were on balance much cleaner than people of the Sixties and Seventies, as I remember, for all they did not shower every day. And being one of those who arrives at the campgrounds at Le Mans on Sunday afternoon when the shower block does not open until Wednesday morning, I am very much aware of just exactly how much washing can be done in a bucket -- washing my hair first of course, to keep the cooties away, then using the bucket of water to swirl out the commode. There is no earthly reason why a town full of people who have to live on a truckload of water a day should be wasting so much of it in the shower.
Finally, it was mentioned that so greedy and wasteful is this little town that frequently the water runs out before the three hours are up -- leaving the laundry and the dishwasher halfway through their cycle and the teenagers covered with lather. What lesson do you suppose they learn from that? Why, start sooner! Get Yours before your neighbours Grab It All!
If this group of modern-day Survivors had ever been taught how to save water the old fashioned way, they could probably have water all day long from that one tankload. As it is, they are only serving as an example of how hopelessly anti-survival modern ideas of "need" really are.