A while back I heard a story, supposedly true, about a remote island with a lighthouse on it. The lighthouse keeper, his wife, and their toddler son lived there all alone. Their only contact with the outside world was a monthly supply boat. The supply boat brought food and fresh water, since the island was a barren rock. They stored the water in a big tank.
It came to pass that the supply boat arrived and found the whole family dead. The lighthouse keeper’s journal told the story: shortly after the previous month’s provisioning, the little boy had been playing with the spigot on the water tank. Growing bored with this, he wandered away, leaving it running. By the time his mother discovered what had happened, almost all the water had run out. The family tried to ration it, but there was not enough to get them through the month.
This story has haunted me ever since I heard it, but I don’t remember where or when it is supposed to have happened. It’s a little embarrassing to say, but I am afraid to Google it because the story upsets me so much. Telling it here is easier, somehow.
Never heard the story, but it’s unlikely to be true. A lighthouse on a barren waterless rock would be staffed by single lighthouse keepers, not by anyone with a family and young children. Why would the lighthouse authority want to take on the cost and responsibility of provisioning an infant child on a barren rock? If the lighthouse keeper marries, he’ll be transferred to a more family-friendly station. Or, his family will live on the mainland and not see him that often.
In any event, a lighthouse with resident staff has a kitchen with a kettle and fuel and other equipment which can be used to distill seawater in an emergency.
Plus, lighthouse keepers have radio or visual signal contact; how else are they to relay weather observations? And, they’ve always have flares and other emergency signals; we know there’s shipping in the area (because why else would there be a lighthouse) and even if they had no water at all they would have days to attract the attention of some ship with a distress signal.
So I think you can safely google the story, knowing that it must be fictional.
There is a (supposedly) true story of why there are always three keepers on a Trinity House Lighthouse.
In 1801, two Light-keepers, Thomas Howell, of Kingheriot, and Thomas Griffith of Solva were on duty at Smalls Lighthouse in the Irish Sea, 21 miles off St. David’s Head in Wales.
Griffith died after weeks of suffering but “At that time there was no code of signals – no system of super-marine communication established by which the exact position and wishes of the distrest could be made known.” and no one could help.
Howel was concerned that if he threw the body in the sea he would be accused of murdering him, so he made a coffin and tied it on the outside. The weather was too bad for anyone to get near for several weeks. “Howell’s attenuated form demonstrated the sufferings, both mental and physical, he had undergone; his friends, in some instances, failed to recognize him on his return home. Four months in such a place, and under such circumstances, what would it not effect?”
There are lighthouses within sight of the mainland that cannot be reached six months of the year. Many are (or were) located on spits of land or islands/islets that were surrounded by cliffs and extremely rough waters. Being isolated for weeks or months at a time was a very real thing, and still is for some of them except that resident keepers are no longer needed.
St. George Reef Light is only a few miles off the coast, right at the junction of California and Oregon. Tillamook Rock Light is about a mile off the Oregon coast. Both are clearly visible from many points of the coastline. Both had horrific histories of keepers being isolated and unreachable. Even lights nominally on the coast itself could be isolated when weather was too severe to permit clambering down cliffs - Point Reyes light has a stairway that (now) in concrete with handrails is a hell of a descent in good weather. Trinidad Head sits in the middle of a ~1000-foot cliff and requires a similar almost vertical descent to reach.
In any case, this is a query about a piece of fiction.
Missed the edit: Trinidad Head sits on a 200-foot cliff and is reachable only by a trek over very rough terrain, unsafe in anything but very good weather. Other lights are perched in the middle of cliffs requiring almost vertical descents to reach - and all of this is in Northern California coastal conditions, which is not the LA Basin, kids. T-Head has been hit by waves in during its history. At 196 feet.
(ETA: Don’t mistake photos of the replica lighthouse overlooking Trinidad Bay as the real thing. The original is located much further out on the head and is either barred to or almost inaccessible to hikers.)
And if they didn’t have any of that, and no means to leave the island, they have control of a giant light which is visible for miles. Even if they just turned it off it wouldn’t take long for someone to notice and investigate.
The story also presumes that all of the water would be in a single very large tank. Much more likely, it’d be in a bunch of smaller ones, and they’d have to swap them out every couple of days. Which would mean that the kid could only waste a small fraction of their supply.
Actually, no. Water crises much like what the OP described could and did happen if a single well or cistern leaked or got contaminated. Remember, you’re dealing with ca. 1700-1900 technology and thinking here, not some kind of modern military or survivalist (or even camping) thought.
However, power (oil, wood or even solar) plus a household/workshop full of tools and fittings plus an ocean equals plenty of drinking water, so I think we have to address the idea as romantic fiction. Which is all the OP’s asked. (I also think this might belong in CS, since it’s a story ID question and not a GQ about island survival.)
Almost certainly the OP’s story is somewhere between fiction and glurge.
But we don’t know what era it’s set in. After roughly the 1920s it becomes implausible in the extreme. Today of course it’s pure fantasy, at least for a light maintained by a first world country. But …
In the 1700 & 1800s that sort of stuff wasn’t heart-breaking; it was simply the ordinary hazards of normal daily life for folks out on the edges of humanity. Whether a homesteader, a farmer, a pioneer, or a lighthouse keeper, folks frequently died when a minor mishap painted them into a corner they couldn’t escape with the means at their disposal. A reality that continues for a sizeable hunk (30%?) of humanity even today.
The book “No Great Mischief” that has some sad lighthouse related tales in it - it takes place off the East Coast of Canada, which can be a pretty harsh place, and a bit isolated - although also GORGEOUS.
There’s the problem. Who would have expected a lighthouse in the middle of the Canadian high plains? I’m sure the family never had a supply boat, unless it was a prairie schooner.
On further googlage, it turns out there is a lighthouse in Saskatchewan: Cochin Lighthouse. Which seems to serve no navigational purpose, or any purpose other than tourism, since it was apparently constructed in 1988 specifically as a tourist draw.
Nope. Most are kept in shape as daymarks, and even that is of less and less importance with the cheap universality of GPS. Another few decades and only the pretty ones in good shape that are easy to maintain will remain…
(I was almost one of the last civilian keepers, the #2 choice of the preservation committee. The #1 guy is still there almost 30 years later, despite my occasional attempt to bump him off a rocky cliff.)