Not ours, at least not yet.
I know the weather in the upper midwest has been frightful.
Around here it has been merely cold. Really cold, for several days in a row, and it doesn’t usually get that cold around here.
So people are not always prepared, or more specifically, their houses are not always prepared. Like disconnecting hoses from hose bibs, possibly covering hose bibs, blowing out irrigation systems, keeping plumbed spaces heated … The list goes on.
The water side of my work got very busy yesterday when the sun started warming up certain pipes that had frozen. You see, when the water freezes in the pipes it expands. This sometimes breaks the pipe, but it is not always apparent that has happened right away. The frozen water is acting like a plug in the pipe. But when the ice thaws, all of the leaky spots come to light. Of course this usually happens when the sun is out, which is when people are at work and school. So mid-afternoon on there may be a flurry of calls asking for help. I wonder if our on-call person got any rest in the evening.
At one point we had the fire department in the office. I think it had to do with ice on ponds and ice on the roads (from broken pipes in houses), but we were telling them about half-built multi-family developments, where the fire sprinkler systems are all tied together. Unfortunately, the un-half built buildings do not have heat, or walls, or anything above the slab. Only exposed pipes with water. To stop the bleeding spraying water we had to turn off the feed to all of the fire systems, the occupied buildings too, not just the non-buildings. So inform everyone you can and hope the developer does the right thing and gets some plumbers/contractors on the line.
At our house, so far so good. The hoses are disconnected, but I did not install the little hose bib houses. Fortunately they are directly off heated areas of the house, and I think our walls may let a little heat slip through.
Anyway – I hope your weather is staying manageable. Kind of rambling, but what is on my mind.
Raincharm's Weblog 