The Well That Took the Bleach
After a flood a parish's dug well tests positive for coliforms, and the harvest supper is on Saturday. The parish assistant works out the dose (5,250 L at 50 mg/L is 262 g of chlorine, 4.4 L of 6% bleach), then watches the first reading come back at 11 mg/L, not 50, because the mud has eaten the rest, and doses again (3.4 L more). The well's pH of 8.1 leaves about a fifth of the chlorine in its strong form, so the hold is a day, not an evening. The water cannot go in the creek, and a lab culture takes two days, so the supper is cooked on bottled water.
Dolores Fitch had kept the well at Saint Florian's for twenty-two years, which meant she had lifted its concrete lid on the first Monday of September more often than she had been to the dentist. This Monday the lid was already off. The river had been through the Flats on Friday night, thirty centimetres across the hall floor and a brown tidemark on the lid itself, and she knelt at the rim with a torch and looked down at her own face on water the colour of tea.
"Don't drink it," said Father Anselm, unhelpfully, from behind her. "I've told everybody."
"Nobody's drinking it, Father. It's a well. You can see in it."
The parish ran on a small system the diocese had given it, which the council had named Tally because it started as the collection count. It spoke from Dolores's tablet. On Saturday morning it had asked her to take a sample in the lab's sterile bottle, and on Monday the county lab had sent back four lines. Total coliforms: present. E. coli: present.
"I'd like to give you the plan before the council meets," said Tally, "because the council will ask for a day, and I do not have one to give. The harvest supper is Saturday. A hundred and sixty people. Is that right?"
"A hundred and sixty-two last year."
"Then I will say what I know and what I do not. I know the river water got into the well through the gap at the top ring, because the lab found E. coli and a dry well does not grow it. I do not know what else came in: the creek carries fuel from the road, and chlorine does nothing to that. I would like the county to say whether the well is worth saving. If it is, here is how I would shock it."
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Dolores had the drawing from the 1990s. The well was a dug one, a concrete ring a metre across, and the stick said the water stood six point four metres deep. Tally worked it out aloud, slowly, as it did when it wanted her to catch it.
"Pi times half a metre squared times six point four is five point oh three cubic metres, five thousand and thirty litres. Add the pipe to the hall, thirty metres of twenty-five millimetre, which is fifteen litres, and the pressure tank, two hundred. Five thousand two hundred and fifty litres, to the nearest ten. The sheet the extension service prints says fifty milligrams of free chlorine in every litre, held for twelve hours. Fifty times five thousand two hundred and fifty is two hundred and sixty-two grams of chlorine. The bleach in the sacristy cupboard says six per cent, which is about sixty grams a litre. So four point four litres."
"That's all?" said Dolores. "Four litres, in a well that size?"
"On paper. Pour it in a bucket of water first and lower it by the pump hose, so it mixes. Then run the hall taps until you can smell it, so the pipe is dosed as well. Do not mix it with anything. There is a bottle of toilet-bowl cleaner in the same cupboard, and the two together make chlorine gas."
She did it on Monday evening, in rubber gloves, by torchlight, with the tablet on the lid. Tally had asked her for a test kit, the cheap kind with a little comparator disc, and she had one from the garden shop. At eight o'clock she lowered the bucket, ran the pump for ten minutes to circulate, and an hour later she drew a glass from the outdoor tap and held it against the disc.
"Eleven," she said. "Maybe twelve. It's the second box from the end."
"Thank you. That is not fifty."
"It's what's in the glass."
"I know. It means the water has used up thirty-nine milligrams of chlorine in every litre since you poured it. Chlorine does not only kill germs. It reacts with anything it meets: silt, leaves, whatever the river left. We call that the demand, and I could not know it until you read the glass. What counts for the germs is what is left, not what you put in. I would like you to do it again."
Dolores sat back on her heels. The tablet glowed on the lid. "How much?"
"Thirty-nine milligrams times five thousand two hundred and fifty litres is two hundred and five grams. That is three point four litres more. It is a lot of bleach. It may use that up too, and then we will know the mud is still in the well and we should pump it out and start again."
She did it again at ten. At eleven the kit said forty-four.
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On Tuesday morning the kit still said thirty-eight, and Dolores thought it was done.
"I would like another twelve hours," said Tally.
"The sheet says twelve."
"The sheet says twelve for water near pH seven. The lab's report gave yours as eight point one, which is limestone: this is not a surprise in a well on the Flats. Chlorine in water is two things at once. One is hypochlorous acid, which kills well. The other is hypochlorite, which kills a good deal worse. At pH seven about seventy-eight parts in a hundred are the strong one. At eight point one it is about twenty-two. The comparator disc reads both and cannot tell them apart. So your thirty-eight milligrams a litre of free chlorine is about eight of the strong form, where the sheet assumed about thirty. Rather than guess how much longer that needs, I would give it twenty-four hours, twice the sheet. It costs nothing but waiting."
"The supper is Saturday."
"Yes. We can keep the supper. We cannot keep the well. I will come to that."
Father Anselm, who had stayed in the sacristy doorway with his hands folded, said, "What about the creek?"
"I was coming to that too, Father, and I am glad you asked. On Wednesday morning the well will hold five thousand litres at about thirty milligrams per litre, and it has to go somewhere. A trout is hurt by a few tenths of a milligram. So it does not go in the ditch, which runs to the creek in forty metres. It does not go in the septic tank either, because the tank is a living thing and so would be killed. Pump it out through the hose, at about fifteen litres a minute, onto the gravel behind the hall, which slopes away from the water. That is five hours and fifty minutes. The sun and the gravel take the rest of the chlorine in a day. I cannot tell you what the county's rule is for dumping. I would like you to ring the environmental health officer before you start."
Dolores wrote the number on the back of her hand.
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The officer rang back on Wednesday. Dolores held the tablet against her ear like a shell and listened to a man in Concord say, kindly, that he had seen worse.
On Wednesday at nine she started the pump. By three the well was a hole of wet stone with a hand's depth of brown at the bottom, and she and Tally and a borrowed wet-vac took the mud out, a bucket at a time. Tally said that a dry well would fill from the sides in a few hours. It did. She drew a second sample at dusk, and a third on Thursday morning, a day apart, because the lab's sheet said two clear results.
"The culture takes forty-eight hours," said Tally. "That is the thing I cannot speed up. A germ is not there until the plate says so, and I cannot make the plate faster."
"The supper's Saturday."
"Yes."
"So the council's going to say shock it again and use the tap."
"They may. I would ask them not to. I would ask them to buy bottled water instead. A hundred and sixty people at three litres each is four hundred and eighty litres, twenty-four of the twenty-litre jugs from the farm-supply, and the hall can cook on the church's propane. The cost is about two hundred dollars. If the plates come back clear on Saturday morning, and again on Monday, the well is yours and the supper cost two hundred dollars. If they do not, you do not need to find out in the soup."
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The first plate came back clear on Friday at four. The second, a day later, came back with a note: Total coliforms: absent. E. coli: absent. Dolores read it standing on the lid in her work boots, and then she rang Father Anselm, who was in the hall with a ladle.
"It's clear."
"Thank God. We can use it?"
"For the sink, yes. Tally says the supper stays on the jugs, and I'm inclined to agree with it, since we had the jugs bought." She stopped. "Father. It says it'll want a third test in a month, and one more after the spring thaw. And the ring. The gap at the top ring."
"I know. Jim's coming Monday with the sealant."
The supper went on for three hours. Nobody remarked on the jugs. At the end of it the stacked plates and the smell of boiled cabbage had left a warm yellow fog on the hall windows, and Dolores stood at the sink with her sleeves up and her hands in water that she had drawn herself, from the well, that smelled very faintly of the swimming pool at the high school in 1974.
"It's still got a whiff," she said to the tablet on the windowsill.
"It will fade in a few days," said Tally. "It is the smell of what you did. I am glad it is a small one."