Patriotic Pipe Burst

What was the third most exciting thing of your weekend? (And the absolute MOST important indicator that you really, REALLY need to get a life?)

You know those little plastic (“Made proudly in America!”) American flags that real estate agents stick by the driveway of everyone’s house for miles around just before the Fourth of July? Most of the houses on our block still have them up. So I thought it was a little bit odd, but not too much, to see two of them down the block stuck in the middle of the street. I noticed it, but I wasn’t worried about it – kids goofing around was my assumption.

An hour or so later I heard some heavy, loud engines outside, which is unusual a bit since we’re on a very narrow, very steep street climbing to the top of a very big hill. They’re out there for a while, idling, then I heard them fire up and I saw two fire trucks passing by. Which is even more rare. So I go to take a peek.

The street’s completely blocked off in both directions. Time for a stroll.

As they said on Mythbusters, “Well, THERE’s your problem!”

That’s probably 20 to 30 gallons a minute being wasted there and we’re in the middle of a huge, dangerous drought. They’ll fix that quickly, right?! Or at the very least, get the water shut off. Right?!

But it’s odd that the fire department didn’t do that. Just shut off the water. Is this a “not MY department!” situation?

It’s 15:26 on Saturday.

It’s 26 hours later. We now have cones instead of “borrowed” tiny plastic flags.

The flow has increased and is probably 40 to 60 gallons per minute. So, ballpark figures, 26 hours x 60 minutes per hour x 50 gallons per minute = 78,000 gallons wasted.

It’s Sunday at 17:25

Ooooh, look! Trucks! And it seems that they’ve finally turned off the water. Round numbers, call it 100,000+ gallons wasted.

We’re doing something. Possibly surrendering.

We’ve dug a hole and now we’re filling it. One can hope that some sort of repair was effected while the hole was open.

Thinking about it, this is at least the third or fourth time something like this has happened in the three years we’ve lived here. At what point do the future costs of simply digging up and replacing the pipe all the way up and down the hill outweigh the sunk costs in all of these little halfway measures?

Everyone’s gone, there’s “something” filling the hole (“Siri, define half-assed job…”) that I’ll be trying to miss for years in order to save my car’s suspension, and there’s mud in the street all the way up and down.

Wow. Big thrills!