Richard Thorne, the board president, sent a second letter in the seventh week. This one had a different tone. The welcoming language was gone. He wrote that the board had become aware that I had been conducting surveys near the community’s water infrastructure. He wrote that any interference with that infrastructure would be considered a hostile act and would result in immediate legal action.
He referenced the community’s 47 families. He used the phrase long-established community resource. He did not site a single legal document. I photographed the letter. I scanned it. I sent it to Patricia. Patricia called me that evening. She was calm, but I could hear something sharper underneath it.
She said Thorne’s letter had just made things significantly easier for us. He had now put in writing that he considered the well to be community infrastructure on my land without any legal basis for that claim. He had also implicitly threatened me with legal action for activity I had every right to conduct on my own property.
She said that letter was going to be very useful. I asked her if it was time to respond. She said not yet. She said she wanted one more thing first. She wanted a water usage assessment. She wanted to know exactly how much water was moving through that pipe and what it was worth. I hired a licensed hydraologist named Marcus Webb. He came out on a Thursday with flow measurement equipment.
We accessed the wellhead together. Marcus installed a temporary inline flow meter entirely on my property, entirely within my legal rights. He let it run for 72 hours. The numbers were recorded and logged automatically. When Marcus pulled his data, the results were significant. The well was producing approximately 18,000 gallons per day, all of it flowing west into Maplewood Estates.
