Water Woes

Monday morning I had just gotten when I noticed a call from a local number coming in. The phone doesn't ring (on purpuse), so if I don't see the banner pop up on the phone at the time, I don't know there's a call. I often get a lot of junk calls around this time, because it's mid-morning eastern time where a lot of those calls originate. But I did answer this one, and it was the renter at the farm saying that a pipe in the old butcher shop (SE side of the shop building) had burst and was flooding that room and rest of the shop. 

It was still dark out, and we didn't know how to get to the main shut off - I know where it is, but it's underground on the outside of the building and buried under a couple of feet of snow, and we've never opened it up all the way and don't know what tool we'd need to close it. (Note - good idea to figure all that out.)

Meanwhile, water was still pouring out of what turned out to be not just a little split in a pipe, but a PVC pipe that was completely shattered and split for about 18" (we later figured out). 

I grabbed some tools and Pam got up and decided to come too. The flooded room was full of boxes she had moved from her family home in Illinois, including lots of photos and other paper things. I fed the chickens, though the hens were still in their coop since it wasn't light enough to trigger their door. 

Finally, I did the one smart thing of the day. I called the water company office and got an emergency number from the message. It was 6:30 am and I felt bad about calling Mike - I've met him a couple of times, Trout Lake being a small place - but he answered right away and said he'd go shut the main shut-off out by the road.

When Pam and I arrived about 30 minutes later he was at the gate, having just got the water shut off, and he gave us a ride up the drive, which was too deep in slush for our car. 

It was a mess. The water level in the butcher shop room was 3-4" deep and water was pouring out from under the door and flooding the rest of the shop. Pam, Stephanie (the renter) and I used a push broom and two plastic snow shovels to push water out of the main shop door, which fortunately had a bit of a drain cut in the concrete to shunt water out. I was also helping Mike find the leak and figure out what had happened. 

Probably only in a small town would the water company operations manager volunteer to do the plumbing to plug the pipe so we could get the water turned back on. There was about a half hour delay waiting for the hardware store to open, and in the meantime we pushed more water. Mike came, cut off the pipe below the break (he thought) and capped it with a shut off valve. After waiting a bit for the pipe glue to set, he went out and turned the water back on. Turns out the pipe split was a little longer than he thought, and there was a small leak shooting out a spray of water right under the new joint. So he fixed it a second time, and this time it was good. 

After a couple more hours pushing water around, one of the contractors came to work on the house, and he set to work with their large shop vac cleaning up water in the main part of the shop where a lot of the stuff for the house project was at. 

To wrap up this long saga, we worked the rest of the day on the water and elevating the soggy boxes, did a countertop fitting consultation at the house, and took a couple of the most urgent wet items - family photos mostly - back to White Salmon. 

By the time we arrived it was getting dark, and I went down to check on the chickens again and found they were already back in their coop for the night. 

After supper we spent a couple of hours separating wet photos to dry- mostly 8X10 black and white - Pam's Dad had been a newspaper photographer and also took and printed a lot of family photos. 

We did more yesterday, and will be going back out today. The flood also shorted out the chest freezer that we inherited at the farm, and I have some things in there that I need to move - fortunately there are two refigerator/freezers that we also inherited that work, and I think they will hold most all of it. 

So that's the excitement this week. Today is Pam's birthday (and Anna's 4th as well). Birthday party plans have been pushed back a few days.