From caking their hands in mud to being sprayed with jets, the Philadelphia Church of God’s irrigation department is responsible for ensuring the campus receives water. Staff members Warren Reinsch and Charles Wittsell work together on maintaining and improving the irrigation systems.

Reinsch described irrigation as “providing [trees and plants] the water [they] need to survive until the next rain when it really gets the quantity that it needs to grow.”

There are two different ways of getting water to plants, according to Wittsell: sprinklers and drip irrigation. Wittsell said the irrigation department—which receives help from landscapers—has been switching to drip irrigation “for all of the landscaped bushes and the shrubs.” He said drip irrigation is superior, as it will water the soil and not spray other parts of the plant that don’t need to be watered.

Reinsch said that the buildings are fed through the rural water district, whereas irrigation water is sourced from the campus’s 14 wells, ranging from 250 to 300 feet deep and each supplying about 40 to 60 gallons a minute at their highest capacity. Each well on campus gets its water from rainfall. When the irrigation department drills a well, they are tapping into the sandstone where the different levels of water are. Reinsch said that a well drilled 100 feet down provides about 10 gallons per minute. “If you drill 200 feet down, maybe you’ve gone through another layer of sandstone that has water in it … so you have 20 gallons per minute plus the 10 from above. He said that the further you go down, “you get bigger pools of water, and you get everything above it” too, because the water “just falls into that hole that you dig.”

“That would be a lot of water that we have to pay the city for, but because we’ve got our own wells, all we’re doing is paying the electricity to run the pumps—and those aren’t even running 24/7.” He said it helps save a lot of money. Reinsch said watering one soccer field for 30 minutes takes about 20,000 gallons of water.

Wittsell said members could pray for the department to “get good materials” for installing irrigation lines. He also asked for prayers that pipes don’t crack when they cut them, or that they spot it before installing it.

Wittsell said there are a few pipes in the ground on the campus that “would be really hard to change out. You either cut up the road” or “have someone come out with a bore machine and bore under the road.” He said to pray that any of the pipes that are harder to access don’t need maintenance.