Of portents and plumbing
I must’ve been missing more sleep than I thought; wound up unable to stay awake until like eleven hours after I went to sleep. Happens.
But I was awake for a spell around 10 AM. Emma wanted out a bit earlier. It’s cold as a politician’s heart out there; she wanted back in pretty expeditiously. So I padded to the back door to retrieve her.
As I did I became aware of a persistent mechanical sound. After a moment I identified it as a helicopter. They fly over my house all the time. Once or twice a week I see V-22 Ospreys (aka Flying Crematoria) go over.
But this noise wasn’t Dopplering or showing other signs of movement. When I opened the back door I saw a helicopter hovering not very far to the west. A check with binocs confirmed it was the KOAT-TV News bird.
So I went back to bed and clicked on Channel 7. They were showing, I believe, The View, in the right-hand pane of a split window. On the left was live aerial footage of what the crawl bar beneath described as “Albuquerque home in flames.”
Indeed. And indeed it proved to be on Grande near Griegos, a block past 12th Street. Basically ten or so blocks due west of me - half a mile to a mile away.
I didn’t see much by way of flames coming from the house, not that I particularly wanted to. What really caught my attention was that the street was on fire.
Let me repeat that: The Street. Was On Fire.
Apparently a natural gas pipe had exploded in the house. It obviously lit the feedline running beneath the street because there was this line of bright orange flames dancing right on up through the blacktop.
So more with a magpie fascination for something shiny than anything else I lay and watched it for a while until sleep reclaimed me. The fire guys were on hand pretty quick, hosing water down into the hapless house from a ladder extended right over the top of what appeared to be a big square skylight. But no matter how much they sprayed on the street, the line of fire just kept billowing away, undaunted.
That made an impression on me, I guarantee. Kind of an unnerving sight for a homeowner. (If your macabre curiosity overwhelms you, you can find details on the story and a video on the Koat.com website here. No idea how long they’ll archive it.)
Anyway, as I said, I fell back to sleep afyter half an hour or so. When I finally dragged my dead … mass out of bed sometime after 1 PM (!) I shortly found myself enthroned. And while thus occupied I heard/felt a sort of hefty thump and a rushing sound.
At first I thought the heater was digesting its own entrails, which would be swell on what seems to be the coldest day yet this winter - if I recall correctly, the WeatherScan channel said it was 29, meaning 25 or so down here in the Valley. But after a moment I realized the heater was running as smoothly as it ever does, and that the rushing sound was the all-too-familiar sound of water running through my pipes. Even though it wasn’t turned on anywhere.
Yes, we’d had a freeze-related rupture. And yes, I left my taps running, indoors and out. However, late last night I discovered the faucet out back beneath the kitchen window had quit running. And the faucet itself had frozen tight. I thought of pouring hot water on it in hopes of being able to turn it on to a drizzle, but discarded that for fear of causing exactly the sort of disaster I wanted to avert.
These pipe blowouts happen to me on pretty much a biennial basis. I take precautions; but every once and a while one slips past me. Fortunately this one was about the least traumatic I’ve ever had: it didn’t happen a) in the middle of the night and b) on Christmas Eve; meaning I could attend to it pretty expeditiously instead of having to wait a day until the stores opened to turn my water back on. And it was a surprisingly minor, or at least relatively easy-to-repair failure: the plastic adapter I’d used to mate the threaded metal pipe nipple to the PVC stub had simply popped off. I suspect that, oddly, it wasn’t the freezing that actually caused the cement to give way, but the join flexing from reheating in the sun.
Nothing was actually ruptured, in other words. And the problem was readily accessible. Bonus.
First on the agenda, of course, was to grab my metal widget from the utility room and turn off the water out front. Next, after I brought the popped-off assembly in, I tried to get the faucet unscrewed from the metal elbow join, it was also frozen in place. In this case I suspect deposits had cemented it in; the faucet’s threads are all covered in deposits so that I couldn’t attach a hose when I tried in autumn.
So basically I was intending to replace that anyway. It fairly quickly came to me that the simplest and most efficient thing to do, rather than wasting on hour and repeatedly banging my knuckles trying to torque the damn thing off with my humongo pipe wrenches (with much attendant high-volume usage of my special words, which always send Emma fleeing to her bed in the safety of her pen) I could quickly and cheaply just replace the whole damn assembly.
So hence I hied me to Samon’s plumbing supply, which is pretty much right around the corner. And about $11.49 later I had all the needed components to replace the blown-out faucet, including PVC dope. (Yes! I bought dope! Bwa-HAHAHA! But, not that kind. Although I suppose you could get high sniffing that stuff, if you didn’t mind your brains running straightaway out your ears.)
As it happens, I’m pretty handy with household plumbing. Getting that work done by somebody else is both inconvenient and tends to involve massive body-blows to the exchequer, so I figure it’s worthwhile just sucking up and doing it myself. A friend of mine who’s an electrical engineer suggested to me I could also do electrical repair, since it involves pretty much the same principles (i.e., flow is flow) and all. True enough; I demurred, though, pointing out that if I screw up the plumbing I get wet, the floor gets wet, possibly I wind up with doo-doo up to my ankles. Now imagine that with fire, and you see why I tend only to attempt the most rudimentary electrical repairs.
Anyhow, I got the new join glued on and the rest assembled and waiting to be screwed in place. The pipe dope can says it can be “handled” in about 15 minutes, whatever that actually means, but to wait “24-48 hours” before applying pressure. I.e., turning the water back on. Now, I’m aware that’s mostly a CYA please-don’t-sue-us dodge: plumbers for the most part don’t wait any 24 hours until turning the water back on, or customer whines will deafen them. I’d whine.
But, yes, in this case I’m chicken: I don’t want the new glue to fail while I’m out for a time this evening, rocket the new faucet into the air and turn my yard into a skating rink. My friends with whom I’m going to watch movies may regret my decision to dispense with a shower; but I intend to shortly go and douse myself vigorously in talcum powder and sort of hope for the best.
In any event … strange day indeed. But at least I got off easier than those poor folks over on Grande, to whom my heart goes out.