A town built over a mining accident
The water under the ghost town in this book is not groundwater. The regional water table sits 340 meters lower than the mine adit it comes out of. It is a trapped pocket in volcanic tuff that a mine happened to cut into — and it survived the drought precisely because, unlike a spring, it had nowhere to drain.
The full note is still being written. What has already been checked is in the figures below.
- Regional water table
- ≈ 910 m
- The adit mouth
- ≈ 1,250 m
- Difference
- 340 m — the water is above the table, not in it
- Real Rhyolite's own water supply
- none — piped in from Beatty from 1905
Sources
- ⟦Forrás — perched aquifers in volcanic tuff⟧
- ⟦Forrás — Rhyolite water pipeline, 1905⟧
What this is
When Even Machines Prayed for Rain is an interactive gamebook set in 2052, on a road across the American Southwest. Every location in it is a real place, and notes like this one are what happens when the real place refuses to behave.
Play the first hours →