Yesterday in the Orthodox Church we commemorated the Woman at the well. The story deals with the life giving water that only Jesus can bring. It is an amazing story of peace and reconciliation.
On Saturday, a very large pipe burst just outside of Boston and more than 2 million people are now under a boil water order including my parents. All the water that comes out of the tap needs to be boiled for at least a minute before it is good enough to drink. I guess they water folks are using a back up system and the water is not treated so it is not safe to drink. You can bath in it but not drink it or brush your teeth and the like. The upside is they had water.
Down in Tennessee yesterday they saw some of the largest flooding in more than 100 years. A few of the folks I follow on Twitter and Facebook live in and around Franklin and it sounds like the whole place was under water. So they had more water than they could handle and the folks in Boston did not have enough.
It is amazing the things we take for granted. We walk over to the tap and run the water, fill a glass, and drink it down. We don’t think about it we just do it. How many of us run the water for a minute or more to make sure the water is hot? How many if us run the water the entire time we are brushing our teeth? How many of us take showers that last 20 minutes or more? The average tap will run about 1 gallon of water a minute, so a 20 minute shower will use 20 gallons of water!
God created this earth we live on and left to us to care for. We have not treated it well but we can change. We can recycle, conserve water etc. I am planting a garden here this year and I am also installing several rain barrels to collect the rain water to water the garden with. I am doing my bit, what are you doing?
I was working in Newton on Saturday when it all happened. The main is located not too far off of Route 30 near the Weston/Newton line. I heard that the dump rate into the Charles River was on the order of 8 million gallons per hour before they capped it…