Around 11:30 p.m. last night, Justin and I were watching television with Chris and Allison (roomie and his fiance). I was kind of dozing off so I missed the excitement. Apparently, Justin, Chris, and Allison suddenly heard a strange suction noise coming from the front bathroom. They ran to the bathroom and turned on the lavatory (that's a sink for you non-architects/interior designers). No water. They just heard more suction noise.
Allison said it sounded like a water pipe busted under the house. She experienced this a few years ago and ended up with $2,000 of water in her front yard. Justin immediately grabbed the water meter key and headed to the water valve at the road. He turned off the water at the road and went under the house to find the broken pipe. Allison and I stayed in the house while Justin and Chris handled the crawl space activities. Occasionally, Justin would ask me to "stomp in the kitchen" or "stomp in the laundry room." He was checking the pipes at each plumbing fixture in the house. After a short while, he and Chris came inside and said it must be on the county's side of the valve because he couldn't find any water under the house.
We called the county's emergency line and explained the situation. The lady I spoke with asked if we were near a particular road and I said, "Yes, that road is in our neighborhood." She said they were doing some repair work on that road and had the water in our neighborhood turned off. I'm thinking, "It would have been nice to know this, but whatever." I thanked her and hung up.
Our neighborhood has a Facebook page, so Justin checked there and found out what really happened. A water main broke in the neighborhood, so they turned off water to make repairs. They were told the repairs should take a couple of hours.
A couple of weeks ago, a major water main broke a couple of miles from our house. It was under a major road that runs beside our house. The county has been trying to make repairs the entire time, but we've had rain for a solid week. Friday/Yesterday was the first day we saw the sun since last Saturday. Apparently, the water pipe was a thirty inch pipe. I didn't realize they made pipes that big, but according to news stories, that's the size of it. System monitors immediately notified the county of the break, but the massive gush of water destroyed a large section of road and sidewalk within minutes.
Never a dull moment.
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