System in Crisis - Part 2

 Even a system that has been running well for years seemingly can't avoid a rough patch from time to time.  This time, January/February 2021, has been one of those.

It's been brewing for awhile.  Too few people doing too many of the tasks that are needed to keep things running.  Events started coming to a head a year or two ago when the "maintenance person" notified the Board that he would be moving sometime in the next 2 or 3 years.  This generated a wee bit of consternation, mostly because of the way tasks have been allocated  by default over the past few years.  If you look over this recent blog, System in Crisis - Part 1, you will see why.

The immediate reaction from the Board was to request the creation of an "operations manual" as well as some searching for someone who would be able to take over.  The result of this, in practical terms, was to create a whole new category of work - defining and documenting all of the steps that are regularly needed to keep a water system for around 50 people running every day, year after year.

On several occasions, the maintenance person was "out of town", so to speak, and when the inevitable issues popped up, it fell to a very small number of other community members to sort it out.  Some of those community members had been volunteering for the system for many years and were at the point in their lives that they didn't want to spend hours troubleshooting and fixing whatever had broken.  But unfortunately, by the time these issues popped up, there really were only 2 or perhaps 3 people in the whole subdivision who understood enough about the water system to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.

Some of these "events" have been documented elsewhere.

The most recent event, though, was a leak (the second) at a property that has been more or less a problem child property for a couple of decades.  The leak was suspected around Christmas and confirmed at the beginning of January when the water meters were read.  The residents were notified.

Unfortunately, the residents were tenants, not the owners of the property.  Also unfortunately, the actual property owner was in the process of having the property taken away by foreclosure action meaning that there really wasn't an "owner" to deal with.  

The leak itself wasn't exceptional, although it was significant.  Around 7 m3 of water each day when the normal household demand would be closer to 0.5 m3 in 24 hours.  It worked out to close to half of all the water consumed in the subdivision each day.  That said, total water use in the system remained around one-third of the normal daily use during a hot, dry summer.  Serious, but not unmanageable.

The Board communicated with the tenants, with the owner, with the law firm involved, with a local contractor.  A plan was formulated, notice was given to the residents of the property and a deadline for action was established.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for at least one resident who then proceeded to attempt to micromanage and undermine the decisions of the Board and criticize the actions of both the Board and the maintenance person, seemingly for not "being around" when a couple of events happened to take place, not taking the leak seriously enough, whatever.  It's important to keep in mind that this maintenance position is a volunteer position, not a paid position, but also to note, once again, that there really aren't any other people in the subdivision who can troubleshoot and fix things that go wrong.  Other than the one person who was doing most of the complaining.

Board members were, understandably, upset.  As of this writing, two have resigned, one has agreed to stay on for a short time until things can be sorted out, two new Board members have been recruited and the maintenance person has given notice that he intends to step away from all his volunteer duties sooner rather than later.  The word "immediately" was only avoided by some luck, the quick actions of two remaining Board members and the resignation of another.  And, fortunately, no further criticism from the bleachers.

As the Board-imposed deadline arrived, so did an excavating contractor, and within 2 days, the leak was fixed.  Pretty much as the Board had dared to hope it would.

But now, we have a number of angry, upset community members, a Board in disarray, and the possible prospect of losing the one person who has been doing much of the nuts and bolts work to keep the system running over the past several years.  It hasn't been a happy time here in Shangri-La.

One of the lessons from this is that an organization should never take happy times for granted.  They are unlikely to last.