As previously mentioned, one of our 2500 gallon water tanks was missing from our property and found at the bottom of a gully. At first we weren’t sure if it was vandalism or just the wind, but now we’re pretty confident it was just poor planning and bad luck.
When first delivered, we had 800g of water in one and 200g in the other. We used probably about 200g of water before we left for our summer travels and we thought we had been pulling from the 800g tank. Turns out we were emptying out the lesser full one. There are many things we could have / should have done prior to leaving to ensure our tanks were secure, but we didn’t. So now we have a 500 lb plastic tank at the bottom of a gully. We talked to our water guy and he came out to consult on potential solutions. He told us it was going to be difficult and costly for him and his crew to get the thing back up to our bluff. His main concern was the tank being punctured due to the trip down the gully and thus wouldn’t be usable if we were able to recover it.
We’ve hiked down to survey the state of it and it doesn’t seem to have any holes. The bottom is currently resting on an outcropping from the wall and that’s where there might be damage. It has pushed in the bottom but doesn’t seem to have punctured through.
The lid was still on and there is still water inside, so we need to empty it before attempting any sort of rescue. And as you can see, not a lot of water in there which means it was probably mostly empty before it got blown off the bluff by wind.
The current plan is to 1) empty the water, 2) secure it, 3) haul it up the cliff. Hopefully we won’t sustain much damage on the way back up, but who knows. Here’s the cliff:
From more angles (in the first/drone photo, the tank is in the top right corner):
We bought 1000 ft of paracord and measured the distance from the edge of our pump house / shed to the tank at the bottom of the gully and it’s about 210 ft. The tank itself has about a 25′ circumference. It’s probably around 500lbs empty. We can get down into the gully by hiking but not with any sort of vehicle. We can purchase a winch, if we can figure out how to secure it in our limestone shale bluff. We’re debating using the paracord or purchasing steel cable to secure and haul it. There are multiple solutions to getting it out and my dad has been helping me think through different rescue scenarios and options. At the moment the most likely is simply hooking it up to the truck and driving to pull it up the cliff. We are out in the middle of nowhere, so whatever we do has to be super safe as it’s about an hour drive to an emergency room, including 7 miles down a dirt road. We don’t want any broken bones, broken cables, people getting squashed or pulled down the cliff. It might take us a while to test things out and put together a plan. In the meantime, we had some fog and several beautiful sunrises and sunsets!
Oh, and I’m working on rock wall landscaping, but it’s pretty slow going. I started by shoring up the road (on the right), then shifted over to the septic area (middle), which had all just been piles of material cleared and pushed around by a bulldozer. I want to put a wall up the right side of the road all the way to the shed, but the rocks there are huge slabs too big for us to move by hand. We need to break them up to move forward there. That’s also a long term project, probably won’t be done this winter.
