Water

We take so many things for granted back home.  Like water - you just turn the tap, and there it is.

We had water in the Cairo condo when we first arrived.  Opening the condo is a bit like opening the cabin in the spring back in Wisconsin; turn on the gas ( we leave it turned off at the main valve near the meter), get the heat going (we have two small electric space heaters), then turn on the water and see if the water heater works.

This year, the water supply went off after a day - and stayed off for most of the following day.  Back on for a couple of hours - then off again.  Repeat.

We have never had this problem before - maybe an hour's interruption but not a major outage.  It takes a while to ferret out the real explanation of anything in Egypt.  Worse yet, things are always going to be "fixed soon."

I knew we had a nice new pump for the building - our HOA fees increased from $7 a month to $10 a couple of years ago to cover the replacement and re-plumbing.  I could hear the pump running, grinding somewhat, since it was not drawing any water.
When we asked about the situation, broken pipes were mentioned along with neglected shut-off duties.
 
Our water supply system consists of a small pump in the building lobby that supplies a small stream of water to a tank on the roof where gravity does the rest of the work meeting resident demand.



For some unknown reason there is occasional manual intervention to either start or stop the pump.  The reason for this is not at all clear. In Egypt there are many things that are unclear to both us and locals.

After much detective work, the main problem appears to be inadequate water supply to this whole area of Giza.  We are surrounded by many buildings that have sprung up "illegally" following the revolution. (They didn't have permission to build.)  The buildings have hooked into the limited water supply and as more residents appear, water demand has exceeded supply.  Now, we might think the solution is to increase supply but here, each building adds a booster pump outside to increase their share of the available water in the pipe.  We are the only building along the street that does not have this booster pump.

It appears that the residents of our building have come to accept water outages as the new normal.  Our immediate neighbor across the hall supplied us with a pump and water suitable for washing dishes, hands and flushing the toilet. A full 1.5 liter bottle will also do the trick but why should we pay for water to flush?  People here are resourceful as well as generous, friendly and helpful. The photo shows how the pump works.  It does not suggest that we will drink the water. We don't know the source.



This hole just outside our building is to be the location of our new booster pump.  It is right next to the telephone wire box shown in previous posts.



As I write this, it has been 54 hours since the last water outage.  Linda is no longer threatening to return to the States and I feel clean all over. (Linda's comment--It wasn't an empty threat.  I was totally prepared to pay $1000+ for a ticket to Minneapolis.  No reason for me to live without water; I'm not camping!)

If you think this is all a bit crazy - and perhaps even fake news, let me suggest some reading.  There is a wonderful book titled, Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control by David Sims, that I recommend if you want to learn more about the "informal city."  To get a shorter and less academic overview, follow this link.