In practice hexagram 48 is read for resources that exist but are not currently being used, and for the work of restoring access to them.
The third line carries the reading most often: the well is cleaned, and nobody drinks from it. Wilhelm adds that this is the heart's sorrow, and that the well could be drawn from, if the king were clear-minded, good fortune might be enjoyed in common. That is a description of a real and specific frustration: something has been made good and nobody has noticed. Querents recognise it immediately.
The other reliable reading is the rope. The judgement's warning is not that the water is absent but that the means of reaching it may be inadequate, and a great many situations that produce this hexagram involve a querent who has the resource and lacks the apparatus, the contact, the tool, the qualification, the vocabulary.
The hexagram is also read for what is common rather than owned. A well serves a settlement; it is not private property; and readings that treat it as personal supply lose the collective sense that the judgement plainly carries.
Translations converge here more than almost anywhere else in the book, and for the reason already given: the imagery is concrete. Where the Zhou Yi talks about wells, ropes and jugs, Wilhelm, Legge and the later manuscript-based versions say very nearly the same thing.
That convergence is itself an argument for reading the concrete hexagrams closely. A reader who wants to know what the Zhou Yi is actually like, without having to adjudicate between translators, could do worse than start here and at the Cauldron rather than at the first two figures, where nearly every word is contested.