Water Sports

Aramco waters everything in camp with reclaimed waste water. It smells faintly like sewage and I've been told not to walk in the grass in sandals if I have a cut on my feet. Eww. Even with all the watering they do, they still have extra waste water. They don't collect it and treat it over and over. They dispose of the extra waste water in spray fields--flat spaces in the desert south of camp peppered with gigantic rainbird-like sprinklers.

When I took the dogs out for their regular weekend jaunt in the desert on Thursday, one of the spray fields was active. Because this is waste water after all, they don't do much maintenance on the sprinklers and you can see in the photo below that some of them are broken and simply shoot vertical geysers of water in the air.


There is a lot of extra vegetation in the spray fields, far more than would normally grow in the desert. That's what gives the field that dark-grey-green color.


Anyway, the dogs love to play in sprinklers and when Harry saw those giant jets going in circles, he just went crazy, running around and around. The water comes out at a high velocity--it has eroded the sand around it like a moat and flattened the plants in a radial pattern. Harry can personally attest to the force of the water--it only took one good shot and he stayed behind the jet after that!


Mimi had to get into the act too. I managed to stay out of the stream and keep my camera dry while she played in the water and mud.

Fun has its price though. Both dogs got baths when we got home!