This island has no water plant. It has rainwater, one hundred household tanks the council installed, four public standpipes, and the groundwater, which is brackish in half the island and fit only for washing.
In the wet months this is comfortable. In February and March it is not, and in the driest year in recent memory the standpipes ran for four hours a day in the third week of March.
The arrangement, agreed at an open meeting with the growers present. From the first of February, standpipes run from six until nine in the morning and four until seven in the evening. Irrigation from the standpipes stops entirely, and growers use the plot tanks and the two wells at the east end. Households with a tank still on a good level are asked to leave the standpipes to households without one, which is not enforceable and has worked every year through nothing but being said out loud at the meeting.
What the council does in a bad year: asks for a water delivery, early, in writing, before the standpipes are down to four hours rather than after. That request goes to the office that handles it and the council publishes the date it was sent and the date of every reply.
A household without a working tank should come to the office rather than wait for the council to notice. Eleven tanks have been repaired or replaced this way in two years, out of the maintenance budget.