If gas pipelines can fail so can water pipelines. Not too long ago Texans were self-sufficient in household water. Here's a beautiful neoclassical Victorian style above ground cistern to store roof rainwater, at the Rooke House, La Rosa Ranch, U.S. Highway 77, Refugio County.
The problem with above ground cisterns is that they are vulnerable to weather and fire. In Texas all towns and many homesteads used private hand built underground cisterns that could hold 2,000-4,000 gallons of clean drinking water. No water bills, less taxes, sustainable.
Almost all of these have either been removed or filled in, in a fit of damn-the-consequences progress. Here is one that at least remains partly in place, the cistern at the 1834 Fanthorp Inn. Beautiful building, a must visit for Texans into trad building.
However, the king of Texas cistern infrastructure, and possibly the first public utility in the state, is to be found in Brenham, where the locals built dozens of huge underground public cisterns for storing water for firefighting purposes. Local action! thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas…
One of the giant underground cisterns in Brenham is partly "open" to the public. More remain hidden, or have been destroyed over the years. Rebuilding these should be a worthy infrastructure/resilience project for any town in Texas and beyond.
The water was removed from the cisterns using either a low tech bucket and rope, or a slightly higher tech hand pump system. If you want the latest in off-grid water pumps though, operating by the flick of a switch, you get a windmill pump. agritechtomorrow.com/article/2018/0…
You can use them in cities too. Instead of using windmills to generate electricity to operate an electric pump, just skip the expensive converter and use it directly, mechanically. They are beautiful too. Great for aquaponics and automated systems.
"Cisterns and wind millls will keep a Texan family in water indefinitely. Fine. How about a Texan city?" Why I am glad you asked! Ancient Greeks did it 2200 years ago, with far less tech and the same sized cisterns.
"Fine. But Texas is big and in my parts we can see a whole year without rain. Can cisterns see us through that?" Just build bigger cisterns. The Ancient Romans kept an entire city supplied in one of the harshest deserts they knew, in Syria.
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