The Day an Abandoned Cistern Started Whispering Water

The Day an Abandoned Cistern Started Whispering Water

Dread and wonder collide when a lineman presses her ear to a welded steel plate and hears the unmistakable murmur of moving water inside a sealed concrete cistern on the driest February in forty years - in a county where the well failed five years earlier. How can clean water appear in a tank welded shut with original bolts, and how long had this subterranean process been unfolding before anyone listened?

In this episode, we follow the sequence of reports, calls, and field visits that pulled a county subsurface anomaly, a structural engineer, a freelance journalist, and a ranching family into a puzzle beneath eight hundred and sixty acres of caliche and loose shale. What did the twelve-foot moist ellipse above the cistern and a flagged fracture ninety feet below really mean?

Person: Karen Williams
Location: Ridgetop Mesa, eastern Palo Seco County
Date: February 2011
Event: welded cistern found to contain moving water
Engineer: Paul Deeter

- The cistern is a poured-concrete tank approximately eight feet in diameter with a welded steel plate bolted over the access port.
- The well feeding the cistern was capped in 2006 and the plate was welded and bolted that same year; bolts remained original and undisturbed in 2011.
- A twelve-foot wide, roughly elliptical patch of moist soil centered on the cistern contrasted with bone-dry surrounding land.
- A 2008 county subsurface survey flagged a possible fracture zone roughly ninety feet beneath the Andrews property and recommended follow-up that was never funded.
- Karen Williams had eleven years' experience as a lineman and reported the sound as a "possible gas leak" rather than writing "water" in her initial report.

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