a99kitten's Musings

Received a phone call around 1pm from the town electric/water company that my usage shot up over night and has stayed up all morning. I’ve been in the bay area this week so away from my house. The guy at the water company said there has been a lot of burst pipes today due to the intense cold for the past couple weeks and then it finally warmed up to above freezing (in the afternoon) for the first time yesterday. Great…

Got a hold of a General Contractor that has done some work on the house and asked if he could drive over sometime today and check it out. He said no problem, he’d go right now since if a burst pipe inside it would be very bad.

20 minutes later he called back saying yes, a pipe had burst but in the garage (it’s for the outside spigot.) He turned it off at the source. Said the garage floor was wet along with some of the stuff (toolbox, cabinet, snow blower, few empty boxes) in the garage but most of the water had run outside. There was some dry wall damage by the area of burst but nothing major.

He offered some of his crew to come over after their job today to get the damaged dry wall out of there so the interior wall could dry out. He’d call one of his plumber contacts to get out there tomorrow to replace the pipe and then he’d get his crew to replace the drywall.

So thanks to the water company for noticing this and alerting me to it and a local GC who takes care of his customers (past and present!), no major damage and it will be fixed quickly.

I can assure you this would NOT have happened so quickly or seamlessly in the Bay Area. Pretty sure the water company here could care less about your usage unless you don’t pay for it. And good luck finding a GC who would go out of his way to check for you and then react that quickly unless he was actively working on your house, and that’s even questionable.

Score yet another giant point for small town living in my mind.