I believe it will be a while before we have running water at 555 again.
The landslide near Oyama Fudoson took out a road, the power poles, a cell tower, the gigabit fiber cable, and the entire Oyama area water supply.
The water supply is the biggest problem right now.
This morning we got notification that the water supply from mobile tankers has been replaced with a more permanent solution accessible 24/7 outside the local fire stations. And some of the nearby onsen are offering free admission for residents of the affected areas. I am grateful for both, but that is a bad sign about the longevity of this outage.
The water company is surely doing their best, and I know we are only a week into this crisis, but they aren’t communicating much. So I went down a rabbit hole to figure out what might be happening behind the scenes.
I found out that there are basically four ways to restore water service:
- Interconnection. Hook a working zone to the broken one using a cross-connection pipe. That’s the normal way and how water was restored at Tod’s office. But the Oyama neighborhood pipe that went over the mountain seems to be a stand-alone, dead-end line. (Claude informed me that no cross connections to Oyama are mentioned in system descriptions online.)
- Temporary above-ground pipes. We’ve seen PVC pipes laid out many times when crews are working on repairs and replacements. Can they detour around the mountain or do an interconnection with temporary pipes? Even if they can, it will still be days to weeks before we have water again at 555. But that is quicker than the next option.
- Repair in place. This is a more stable solution than above-ground pipes. But in our case there is no “place” to repair as it has all fallen down the mountain. If/when the slope is stabilized the water system can be restored as it was, along with the road. That is a lot of civil engineering and a timeframe from months to years. With the continued communication of “there is no estimated time for restoration” (復旧の見込みは未定) I have a gloomy sense that this might be the option they choose.
- New permanent pipeline. There is already a plan for this with a schedule of 2034-2045. A bit late for me, but interesting that they knew of this vulnerability and had planned for it. Let me tell you about it.
Oyama got “city water” in 1984. Before that – and even now – there were local water systems run by the residents. Mountain water is still used by many households, though not so many use it for their main source. A few homes have wells.
Even 555 has mountain water, though we don’t use it because our neighbors rely on it and we do not. They once accused me of using it all up (I had not; there was a leak in the system) so I am extra careful not to touch it. However, this morning I cleaned up the 山水 sink and we might use it a little bit.
Since 1996 our water has been pumped along and over the mountains from the Hodai Water Treatment Plant about 15km away (the green section on the map above shows the area supplied by Hodai. There are two pumping stations and some pressure adjusting equipment that I have walked past many times, and apparently a reservoir that I have never seen.
We are way out at the end of the line. It’s inefficient and expensive to pump water up the mountains on a stub pipeline just for our 130 Oyama households. A gravity fed substation makes a lot more sense and that’s what we will be getting in the coming 20 years.
安 房 地 域 水 道 事 業 統 合 ・ 広 域 化 基 本 計 画 aka the “Basic Plan for the Integration and Regionalization of Water Supply Services in the Awa Region” is a grand vision of improving security of water supplies across the whole lower peninsula. It involves a massive restructuring through the newly formed Awa Regional Water Business Integration Council.
One of the (many) parts of the plan is building 大山配水池, a mountaintop distribution reservoir for the Oyama area. But the plan is subject to many hurdles – from securing 2.5 billion yen in funding to finding the land for the new reservoir. Will it come to be? I hope so.
And in the meantime, I want the water company to share information as soon as possible about their plans for restoring service to our neighborhood.
