Lots of news about the drought in Panama and how the Panama Canal needs more water, however there are also a lot of news reports about the flooding in Panama too.
It is our rainy season right now (May through November.) As of the end of August we already have had 91 inches (231 cm) of rain so far.
The problem in Panama is that the water is not managed very well. The country gets plenty of water from rain and the 500 rivers throughout the country, but yet when I turn on my water tap in my kitchen, many times there is no water. In the bigger cities, people have had to line up and fill their jugs of water when a water truck comes down their street.
Water lines around here are pvc pipes laying on the ground. Many have water shooting out of them from breaks in the pvc from either sun damage or from someone cutting the grass with a machete or weedwhacker. There are so many different water systems and it appears each of them have their own problems.
Now, lets talk about my water system. We have a small water board in charge of the line of water running to our property. We either have no water for days at a time or too much water for a day until the amount of pressure breaks a line somewhere in the system and then we go back to no water for a few days. They keep fixing problems with cheap fittings that just continue to break.
At the last water board meeting they voted on whether they should increase everyone's monthly fees from $3 to $5 and unfortunately most people voted to keep it to $3. They also then complained about the lack of water making it to people's houses as if the two items were not related. With no money to buy quality fittings for the pipes, the pipes will keep breaking. So, the vicious cycle will continue. There is also the issue of some farms blocking water to people down the line, so they can illegally irrigate their farm.
When we first moved to Panama, it did not take long to realize that it was normal to go days without water service. We bought 2 water tanks thinking that would be good enough to get it through the days of no water.
Then each year we would decide that we should get just 1 more tank because the days of outages were getting longer and longer. Then we started getting bigger tanks...
That brings us up to this week!
We have once again reviewed our water situation and decided to get rid of 2 smaller tanks for 2 more larger tanks and expand our rain water catchment system with the rest of the small tanks.
They did not have tanks that were the same color in stock, so now we have a light blue, a grey and a black tank. :)
This may seem excesive, it even seems like it to us. We do not irrigate our coffee trees, but we do require water to process the coffee. We also have the Airbnb that can hold up to 7 people, plus regular life of laundry, dishes and showers for Rick and I. (We do pay the city extra taxes and fees for the use of water and trash with the Airbnb, but those taxes and fees do not go to the water board that we use, it goes to the Mayor's Office.) We need enough water to make it through our dry season when we will get little to no rain and the water system we belong to might get water in 2 days a week. The end of December through April are very dry and this is typically our busiest time of the year with our coffee harvesting and the Airbnb is full of vacationers.
So....we need to be prepared for up to 9 people staying on the farm, plus the bathroom use of our staff and around 20 coffee tourists a day.
So, now have expanded the rain catchment. These tanks will fill fast from the gutter water and then also feed our big tanks.
Then of course we need to sanitize our water. We have multiple filters throughout the system and then a UV water sanitizer at the end. The UV bulb gets changed every year and the filters get cleaned or replaced frequently.
This is something I never had to think about while living in the USA. We lived in a city where you just turn the faucet on and you have water. I am sure more remote places had wells or used water tanks, but it was nothing we had experience with before. We even considered building a well, but $15k to dig it is just not in the budget yet.
We have learned a lot and being from a state that made recycling just part of life, we have incorporated those beliefs in our daily lives here. The ducks have a couple of different recycled bathtubs to use for bathing. One of the gutters from our carport area feeds into the bathtub with enough force to actually keep the water fairly clean. Water never stays clean for long with ducks, but right now each night the water gets refreshed from the rain.
I am sure that this is not the end of our water story, but hopefully this dry season goes smoothly!
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