Since its inception in 2007, AgentGenius.com has participated in Blog Action Day, an annual event that “unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day” in an effort to heighten awareness on global issues. This year, the topic is water:
We asked people to submit creative pieces describing what it would be like if they woke up tomorrow and all of the drinking water in America was toxic? You think you have time to conserve and that a Brita filter will fix everything, but given that 40% of American waterways are already too polluted to fish or even swim, do you really have time? Our world is so arrogant with water use that we don’t even bat an eye that it takes 400 gallons of water to produce a single cotton shirt. How can we justify this to our grandchildren when there is no more safe drinking water in our midst?
Below is Minneapolis Realtor, Eric Hempler’s creative entry. We invite you to add your thoughts to the comments as to how YOU would react if you woke up to toxic water nation wide?
I woke up early this morning sitting on the side of the bed thinking to myself, “today’s the day isn’t it?” Looking over at the calendar, I confirmed, started to change clothes and headed down to the basement to start up the Water Purifier. I had read the directions a hundred times before and was pretty sure I knew what to do, but I read through it once again as I started the Water Purifier up for the first official time.
As I was waiting for it to fill up, I looked around for a little bit and noticed how we rerouted everything to and from the Water Purifier. I also recalled the number of contractors we talked to over the impending weeks. It seemed like each person had a different answer on what to do and not a single person had the same price to do the work. When we first started shopping for the oversized water jug, we were given a date when everyone in the United States would have to have one. Everyone was on a waiting list, but we managed to luck out and get ours a month before the deadline, which gave me time to find a contractor, assuming they weren’t already busy, to install the thing.
After meeting with several “experts” I finally decided to do the work myself. The directions were clear and the homework I did online showed it really wasn’t that difficult. Over the next couple of weeks I spent my time rerouting the water supply to our new Water Purifier, which seemed to take up about 100 square feet once it was assembled.
After connecting the supply lines, I had to run lines from the Water Purifier to the Water Heater and routes to the sinks, washer, dishwasher and anything else that had a faucet. After all of that was said and done it looked liked one of those old Octopus Furnaces. There was also a separate hookup for sludge and toxins to exit and were fed into the waste drains.
After everything was hooked up and ready, I did few test runs and everything seemed to be running smoothly. After thinking how much work I had put in assembling everything, I checked the gauges and the main panel to see when it would be ready to pull water from and headed back upstairs. After getting upstairs I laid down on the couch for a little bit until the Water Purifier would be ready.
I forgot I had talked to my son the night before about how we would have to wait a little bit when we got up to have water. Since he’s the oldest and my daughter is still too little to understand I had to explain to my son what we had to setup in the basement to have water that wouldn’t cause “ouwies”. I think my wife did a better job than I did.
My son thought we could just catch the rain or snow when it fell and collect it for the year, but unfortunately it really didn’t work that way. As I was thinking through more of the conversation the previous night as well as the news and conversations about the water problems I started to drift off to sleep.
I woke up the next morning, “Was it all a dream?” I asked myself. I looked over to check the date…
