He said, "Edmund, you have no duty to maintain a particular water quality for a thief. I do not see how that is anything other than your own decision about your own water. Document it for the case file. " I asked Freddy. She said, "Dad, Iowa law on this is settled. A property owner has no duty of preservation towards stolen property.
The thief took the water in its raw state. Whatever state you put your water in afterward is your business, not theirs. Add what you want to add. Just write it down. I wrote it down.
Sheriff Vandermir asked me with Freddy present at my kitchen table whether the salt dose was strictly necessary for the case. I told him that strictly for the case it was not. I told him that strictly for the practical protection of my well from further unauthorized draw during the investigative window. It was. I told him that strictly for the principle that a man should be allowed to defend his own well from a thief who had been taking from it for three straight years.
It was Aldrich looked at me for a long moment. He said in his Dutch Iowa draw, "Edmund, I am not the man to tell another pel farmer how to season his own well. You are not breaking a law. You are not putting it into any water that belongs to another person. Whatever happens to her tulips happens to her because she had no business pulling on your line.
Do what you are going to do. I will not stop you. " He stood up. He thanked Dot for the coffee. He left. I added 53 pounds of granulated solar salt to the main trunk over the following 46 hours through a calibrated dosing valve I had originally installed for fertigation in 2018.
I also added another 4 ounces of fluorescein concentrate to maintain the color marker. The salt concentration in the trunk line reached approximately 4,000 parts per million by Monday morning, well above the tolerance of any tulip cultivar and effectively lethal to bulb crops. I did not adjust the salt level back down. The salt was, by the standards of the wastewater engineer I had been for 28 years, a perfectly reasonable thing to put in my own water. Iowa law agreed.
Berkeley's Garden of Honor by the morning of Tuesday the 30th of April was a fluorescent blue field of dying tulips. By Thursday, it was a Caribbean blue field of brown leaves and shriveled stems. By Saturday, the opening day of Pella Tulip Time and the scheduled judging day for the Garden of Honor, the 16,000 bulbs were a single contiguous patch of necrotic tissue and bright blue stems. The Tulip Time judging committee, having been informed by Sheriff Vandermir on the Tuesday of the criminal investigation, had withdrawn the Garden of Honor from the festival on Wednesday morning. The placard at the Garden of Honor for the Saturday tour bus read in the committee's own careful Dutch lettering temporarily unavailable by request of Marion County Sheriff.