December
15th, 2010
Blacksburg,
Virginia
11°F with 2-3 inches of snow on the ground
What
I knew:
On Tuesday (Dec. 14th), I got breakfast with some of my best friends at 9am,
then went to my statistics final at 10:05, and then studied at Deets
coffeeshop. I went home for a while to say goodbye to my roommate Kara,
then back to campus to study with my housemate Lily till after 10pm. I
probably got to my bed (which is on the basement level of our three story
townhouse) around 10:45pm, my mind full of Philosophy and Linear Algebra, ready
to get up early the next day and study the day away again.
What
I didn’t know:
- This has been the coldest December that Blacksburg has seen in a long, long
time.
- Around 12:30am that evening, my housemate Jessica turned on her sink in her
3rd floor bathroom and no water came. About 10 minutes later, maybe at
12:40, the frozen water finally found its freedom: the pipes under the sink in
Jessica’s bathroom completely disconnected and the waterworks began.
Back
to what I knew:
At approximately 12:45pm, my housemate Elizabeth woke me up shouting:
“Jessey! The pipes! The
house is flooding! Wake up! Come on!” Unfortunately, all my
studying had put me into a really deep sleep, so when I opened my eyes, there
wasn’t much of me looking out. When I slowly recognized Elizabeth’s voice
in the dark, all the alarm it should have aroused I placidly dismissed, confident
that I was dreaming. So I left my bed, stumbled, then followed her up the
stairs. I was ready for whatever this dream could throw at me.
Now on our second level, my feet found themselves in about an inch of standing
water. The sound of water slapping the floor made shouting
necessary. I identified the source of
the noise: water was spewing out of our light fixture at about the same
frequency as a showerhead fully turned on in our entryway and flowing through
our kitchen and hallway floors. Elizabeth apparently had reacted to the
situation alone before now. She had dumped out our recycling bin on the
floor in hopes of using it as a giant bucket, but unfortunately it has 6 1-inch
holes in the bottom. Also our tall trashcan was also dumped out for the
same purpose. These were both good
ideas, however since both receptacles were already overflowing with bottles and
trash, we now had free-floating waste wandering all around our second floor.
Marla (another recently woken housemate) and I found suitable buckets and
then rotated filling them up and then dumping the water in our bathroom sink. As
I started to get into this rhythm, I made some very important realizations:
- I started noticing that this strange water wasn’t just coming from the
fixture. Bubbles were forming on the ceiling and along the closest wall.
Also, water was spraying out of our outlets and light switches.
This was troubling.
- I looked inside of my bucket on one run to the sink. The water
was not clear or even tinted, but dark brown, and not convincingly transparent.
This also was troubling to both me and Marla. At the time, I hadn’t
realized that the water was coming from a pipe leak (about 35% of my mind still
suspected a dream). This led me to believe that our feet and hands and
clothes and house were all soaking in sewer water. Thankfully though, the next realization
swiftly came to overturn that conclusion.
- I realized the reason that Jessica and Elizabeth were making much of the
same noises on the 3rd floor that Marla and I were making on the 2nd floor was
that the same thing was happening to them. Then it all started clicking…
A pipe burst in Jessica’s room… water was shooting out up there, seeping
through the floor to the ceiling and through the walls to the second floor.
Happy day! The water wasn’t brown
from the sewer, it was brown from our old dirty carpets!
- Then all the sudden my stomach dropped and I screamed “My room!”
If water crept from the 3rd floor to the 2nd, then
of course it’s going to creep from the 2nd to the 1st. Oh no.
I abandoned Marla and went to the stairs going down to my level. The light switch didn’t work. Oh no.
I whispered “Courage,” and then slowly went downstairs in complete
darkness. At the bottom of the stairs (now in the hallway on the first
floor) I was directly under our flooding entryway upstairs and Jessica’s
bathroom 2 floors up. I heard the familiar noise of water falling from
the ceiling, but this time it was muted since it was falling on carpet.
Sliding past that (my feet 1-2 inches deep in water and floating carpet),
I resolutely walked into my room, my feet feeling more courage than my heart.
There was my room! The carpet was
still dry and as far as I could tell, everything was alright. So I “grabbed the valuables” (Bible, textbook,
laptop) and trudged back upstairs to rejoin the fight with Marla and report
about the new leakage.
While Marla and I were holding the fort down on the second level, 3
phone calls were made on the third floor. The first call was to Jessica’s
boyfriend Preston, who immediately was on his way over. The second was to
our landlord’s emergency line, which never materialized to anything whatsoever.
The third was to the police, who also came right over. So when I
sloshed back upstairs with my valuables, Preston was just arriving.
We knew we had to turn the main water source off. But we had no
idea where it was. We thought it was a weird looking knob in Jessica’s
bathroom, but it turns out it wasn’t. So then maybe in our laundry room
on the first floor? So when Preston and his friend came in the front door
(which opens to the second level of the house) with shocked expressions, Marla
and I both yelled simultaneously, “Laundry room! Downstairs! Turn
off the water valve!” Our knights in shining armor sprang into action and
ran downstairs in complete darkness.
They were greeted by our unstemmed 1st floor flooding, eventually found
the laundry room, and still later found a very precarious knob next to our
water heater (which now had an inch of standing water under it) and they
successfully turned off our water.
Ten minutes later a policeman arrived. When I think about the idea
of a policeman coming to my house, it makes me think I should have some sort of
speech prepared, or at least some kind of cookie to offer. But when they opened the front door into our
home, there we were in our soaked pajamas, holding buckets over our heads just
looking at them in silence. I eventually broke the sweet silence with: “It
was a lot worse before.” Even though the water was shut off, water was
still draining out of the ceiling at about 1/3 of the ferocity. He
surveyed the scenario, muttered a lot of nothing into his walkie-talkie, and
apparently called for back-up. After another policeman arrived, they gave
us assurance that the house was still livable and then showed us how to pop the
bubbles in the ceilings.
The rest of the story you could probably guess.. wet towels, fans,
groggy final exams, polite repairmen, air-vacs, dehumidifiers, and lots of
rejoicing in our financial role as renters :). Another night in
Blacksburg.
