The reserve that buys days of water for 450+ animals through a well-pump failure — the first layer of water resilience.
Water is the one thing that can't wait
Every animal at Steampunk Farms — all 450+ of them, across 16 species — drinks from a single well. On an ordinary day that's no problem. But a well pump is a machine, and machines fail: a burned-out motor, a dropped pipe, an outage in the middle of a heat wave. Out here in the backcountry there's no city main to fall back on, so the clock starts the moment the water stops.
This project plumbs in a 5,000-gallon reserve tank we already have on hand, so a failed pump never becomes a crisis.
What it does
A full reserve buys 8–10 days of water for the whole sanctuary — enough time to diagnose the failure, pull the pump, and get a replacement in the ground without a single animal going thirsty. It's the first and most fundamental layer of the closed-loop water plan: before we harvest rain or reclaim effluent, we make sure there's always a buffer between a broken pump and a dry trough.
- The tank is already here. This is plumbing and connection — not procurement — so there's no acquisition delay.
- A licensed-well estimate is in hand, so the work is shovel-ready and the cost is known.
- It protects everyone at once. A reserve doesn't pick favorites; it carries the pigs, goats, poultry, and every other resident through the gap.
Why it comes first
In a place where fire, drought, and power shocks aren't hypotheticals, resilience isn't the upgrade — it's the foundation. A system built only for a perfect day fails on a bad one; the reserve tank is how Phase 1 builds the version that holds on a bad one. Fund this, and the next emergency finds the sanctuary ready instead of scrambling.
Goal for this project: $15,000. Every dollar is restricted to the water reserve, and we report it in the open.
