Southern Illinois Water Emergency - Rend Lake Water Crisis

Photo credit, Chris Kays for the Southern

A breach in a 36 inch water pipe yesterday evening has shut down water to several cities and towns across Southern IL.  Residents have been asked to conserve water.  Many business, restaurants, hair salons and schools have been closed until workers can create a bypass for one of the three pumps that service our area.   

As you can imagine this has caused much panic and ciaos through our area as people scramble to the stores to purchase every last bottle and jug of water on the store shelves. 

The tiny town of Dahlgren IL, where two of our children live, will have it's water turned off within the next 2 hours and they aren't sure when it will be up and running again.  Would you be prepared in your home if something like this happened?  It hasn't taken much to shut down half of the water in Southern IL.  We've found that we're not very prepared.  We do have a pond for watering the livestock if needed and I suppose we can boil the water for ourselves.  We can use pond water for flushing toilets also.  What would you do, have you even considered it?  I hadn't until now.

As we sat and thought about how to plan for the next couple of days with the water issue,  we know that we must make preparation for our two incubators and hatchers that have a couple thousand eggs in them.  Our incubators and hatchers require a lot of water to keep the humidity at a constant level.  

This might not seem very important to some flocks but these eggs will be chicks and young pullets that will be shipped out for several weeks and months.  So it's important to us.

We'll be setting large pans of warm water in the bottoms of each unit which should keep the humidity at the correct level but will need to be checked often.  Hopefully they'll get the water back up and running before we need to test this theory but it's not sounding like it. 

Take a moment and make a plan today about what you would do if you wake up in the morning and there is no running water.  If you have a pond, do you have a way to filter that water to make it safe for drinking?  If you don't have a pond where will you get water, it's not as easy as just going to the store, keep in mind the shelves will be bare.

All will be good here on the farm with or without running water, I'm assured of that as I keep this verse in mind.

“But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:14  

Have a blessed day!

Angie