Broken Trailer

This is another example of the reality of living off grid.  Last week, the only water hauling company that would deliver water to people in our community decided to quit business.  That meant that we would need to get our own water up the five miles of dirt road to our house.  This isn't an impossible feat, but it does take more work than just calling the water guy and telling him that you'd like a tank of water brought out.  When he delivers, your cistern is filled in one trip - 3000 gallons at a time.  When we bring our own water to the house, we can really only bring about 500 gallons at a time.  Remember, a pint is a pound the whole world round.  That means a gallon of water (8 pints) is about 8 pounds.  It adds up quickly.

We have...I mean, HAD...two trailers.  A big one and a small one.  The big trailer was occupied with something today, so J decided to take the small one into the community well to get 300 gallons of water.  He was actually pretty worried about using this trailer, as the tires were very worn.  But he figured he would go the back way and drive really slow.

Things were going well.  The cube (a square water tank that holds 300 gallons of water) was centered over the axle on the trailer.  The tires were holding.  J's plan to go very slowly up the back road was working.  Until he had to pull off the road (it's a single track) several times for cars to pass.  It is somewhat unusual to run into ANY cars on the back road, but tonight, everyone had decided to go this way. 

Even pulling off the road wasn't too bad until J pulled off into some sand and got stuck.  He had to "rock" the car back and forth in order to break free of the sand.  That shifted the tank forward on the trailer (moving it off of the axle).  A few minutes later, the trailer frame broke under the pressure of the water tank (remember, that's 2400 pounds of water).

That's when I got a call.  I went down the road to help.  We had to drain all of the water out of the tank in order to be able to move the tank or the trailer.  The trailer was bent at such an angle that it was impossible to hook it to the tow hitch and move it without the broken section dragging.  And this road is not smooth...every rock and boulder would dislodge the trailer.

Once the water was drained, we lifted the cube off the trailer and dragged the trailer off of the road.  We weren't too concerned about leaving the trailer overnight, but the cube was another story.  It would be gone by morning.  With no trailer, we had to think outside of the box (or cube, as the story goes).  J took the two tie downs we had and attached them to the roof rack on his van.  I held the cube up against the back of the van while J laced the straps through the frame of the cube and then under it, effectively strapping the cube to the back of the van like a backpack.  We drove slowly home.

The trailer isn't salvageable.  We will be using the large trailer from now on.  Lesson learned.