Ditch-digging

We lost water pressure yesterday as Charlie was finishing up a shower. This happens every so often if the power goes out or a fuse blows at the pump-house for our well. Outages usually resolve in an hour or so when someone either turns on the generator or flips the breaker.

A quick note to our water group message board told me that it wasn't an isolated problem and everyone's water was out (one of my fears is a "just us" problem which means it could be anything). I went out for a few hours, and came back to a message from the neighbor down the street. It wasn't a blown fuse....it was a full-on busted pipe. Luckily our water system counts among it's members a dedicated engineer who also happens to be a whiz at plumbing.

the newly capped end of the pipe

The original pipes had been buried a good 4 feet down, but over the course of 10 years this particular pine tree had thrown out a root that pushed the pipe up, up, up (you can't really see the root in this picture, it's too far down). It is fascinating to me to know that the tree actually grew a sliver enough to take the pipe to it's cracking point at 10.30am exactly. But crack it did. Brian dug out a big hole and managed to cut, bend, extend upward, and cap one end of the pipe. That restored water to everyone between the well and the cap. Unfortunately this did not reach down to our end of the street. He needed to put another 90 degree bend in the other side of the broken pipe and run a bypass up and over that root. He also had, you know, a life and had to take his kids to karate.

I will take this moment to give a shout-out to Boeing for their current strike. Thanks for making my neighbor available to fix our pipes! You're free to resolve things and let him come back to work now!

So I took over and with pickaxe and shovel and trowel and saw I hacked through a foot deep layer of tangled roots and then down into the dirt. By dusk I was crouched in the hole like a demented troll, reduced to flinging handfuls of dirt up one at a time. The hole was just too deep to wield big tools without bumping the new pipe. I got a few feet of the broken pipe exposed just as full dark set in and walked wearily home as it started to rain in earnest. My muddy clothes were left on the front porch and I treated myself to a gallon of heated up water and a washcloth bath in the kitchen.

Trust me, this ditch is huge! You can actually kind of see the root down on the left of the hole. The original pipes were at the very very bottom by that piece of paper towel.

My reward for hard labor? By the time I walked down this morning to see how he was getting on, the pipe was already fixed and he was waiting for the glue to dry. I got to participate in the ceremonial turning-of-the-valve and suddenly our water was restored. Five minutes running of the garden hose got out the worst of the sediment. Laundry is going even as I type, and a hot shower is in my future.

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Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 5
Eggs laid this year: 224