Idiot guests, not mine, thankfully

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So a good friend of mine is staying at a lovely str out in the jungle for a couple of months. She had stayed there back in January for a couple of weeks, got friendly with the owners, who happened to be there, staying in the big house on the property (they only come down once a year for a month, the rest of the time it’s an str) and decided to come back, as they gave her a good deal for a repeat booking.

The owners are gone now and some guests showed up a few days ago to stay in the big house.
The property has a well and a cistern and it is located under the unit my friend is renting. She was sleeping yesterday early evening because she isn’t feeling well, but got woken up by the pump continually cycling on and off. She knew where the pump switch was from the last time she stayed, so got up and turned it off and phoned the property manager, who came to see what the problem was.

The guests had decided that the pool needed more water, so without asking, they had put the hose in the pool, left it running and forgot about it. The pool overflowed, they drained the entire 10,000 liter cistern and could easily have burnt out the pump had my friend not been there and turned it off.

And this whole area is in a drought situation!

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We had one set of guests do about the same thing, but they fortunately didn’t drain our cisterns.
We solved it by locking up the hoses.

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Aaaarrrggghhh! As a rainwater saver and gray water user and drought survivor, this horrifies me to the core.

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Yep. The city wells in my Mexican town are almost dry. I haven’t gotten piped water since the first of March, I am having to buy truckloads of water to fill my cisterns. Most of my gray water flows into pipes that water various parts of my garden. I am now scooping my dirty dish water out of the sink to water the potted plants, and have a bucket in my shower to catch the water that would otherwise go down the drain, as that shower isn’t attached to a grey water pipe.

Thankfully, due to the nature of my listing and the kind of guests it attracts, my guests tend to be environmentally aware and are good about not wasting water. But of course having guests also entails way more laundry than I’d normally have.