The Campo Haciendo community on North Whidbey, a group of 61 families off West Troxell Road between Ault Field and Deception Pass State Park, has been on water rations for a week because of an ailing well, and full relief is likely weeks away, said Jeanne Napoletano, outgoing president of the community association.

The neighborhood’s 250-foot-deep well, dug in 1969, is “just trickling out water,” she said, yielding nothing close to the 12,000 gallons per day the community regularly uses.

“We’re in the process of waiting for all kinds of professionals to give us calls back,” she said. “We don’t have a timeline yet” for when the water system will be repaired.

Island County helped arrange for the delivery of 20,000 gallons of water from the Anacortes water system, said Eric Brooks, the county’s emergency-management director.

That water was recently dumped from a tank truck into the community’s 60,000-gallon reservoir. Ongoing deliveries are contemplated until a new well can be drilled, which could be several weeks from now, said incoming community association president Andrew Kinkade.

The water dump stirred up sediment in the tank, causing the water to run “a little brownish” out of the neighborhood’s taps, Kinkade said. The water has been tested and is safe, but the state requested that the community boil its water before drinking or using it for cooking, he said.

It’s not clear what went wrong with the well, Kinkade said. It may have filled in with dirt or just conked out because of age, he said. Output dropped from 30 to 10 gallons per minute.

Because well-drillers are booked up, a new well is at least two weeks away, he said.

The area in which the well drillers will have to work is cramped, making the work a challenge, said Vin Sherman, an Island County public-health specialist. The well’s three pumps — one at the bottom, two at the top — will all need replacement, as will all the wiring, Napoletano said.

The new well will be expensive, and the community is not wealthy, consisting of about half trailers and half stick-built houses, with many young families, Napoletano said.

“We’re not asking for a hand-out, but we could use a low-interest loan,” she said.

No state money is available because the outage was not caused by a natural disaster, Kinkade said.