The island water plant came before this project. Getting it into houses was the project, and it took two years.
The pipework was the straightforward half. The difficult half was the households that were not going to be connected under the original plan: eleven of them because the plot boundary was unclear, eight because nobody was living there but the family did not want the connection skipped, and four because the house sat behind three others with no route for a pipe.
The council's position was that a scheme leaving twenty three households out is not a scheme. So the boundary cases were connected to the road main with the connection recorded against the plot rather than against a name, which settled nothing about ownership and got the water in. The empty houses were connected and capped. The four behind others were reached by an agreed easement across a neighbour's plot, written down and signed by both families, and the office holds the paper.
Four hundred and eighty six households have a connection. Nobody carries water in this island any more, and the two standpipes are kept working anyway.
