Fun with sprinklers

[jducoeur]

Now that things have calmed down to a dull roar (literally), let's talk about what happened last Sunday, and the aftermath. This will be very long, but it's been A Week.

Early Sunday Morning

No shit, there we were, sleeping peacefully in the wee hours of Sunday morning, when at 4:22am Kate and I were awakened by a sudden and loud whooshing noise. We both initially thought that something had gone wrong with my CPAP, but it took just a couple of seconds to realize that no -- it was coming from the stairs down from our master suite. Kate dashed downstairs; I grabbed by robe and followed shortly behind her -- and then the sprinkler alarm went off.

Now, let's establish a sense of place. Kate and I live in a nice but distinctly idiosyncratic three-condo building in Somerville; the three households form our own little condo association. Facing the building from the outside, it looks like Unit A is on the left, Unit B (us) is on the right, and Unit C is in back; there is a central hallway going down the middle from the front to C, with A and B flanking it.

(The reality is weirder -- the units twist around each other so that B and C's third floors are over each other's second floors, and A's third-floor bathroom is over my second-floor one. But the fact that our house appears to have been designed by a Lovecraftian cultist isn't very relevant to today's story.)

As to that sprinkler alarm -- that bit isn't entirely new. Being technically a commercial building, we are required to have sprinklers, hooked up to a central alarm, just like in an office building. A few times over the years, the sprinkler pipes have frozen and the alarm has gone off because the pressure went wrong; some years back, we got them in to look at it, and the problem seemed to have gone away.

But the combination of "whooshing" and the alarm? That's bad.

Mind, it was instantly obvious what had happened. Friday night into Saturday was a truly spectacular Arctic blast, one of those reminders of why many folks prefer to talk about "climate change" rather than "global warming" -- while the world is getting warmer overall, it produces Astonishing Weather Weirdness at times, including Boston getting hit by Minnesota weather. Overnight lows in Boston were below -30 if you count the wind chill. At the beginning of our story, temps were actually returning towards normal, but still pretty cold.

So put it all together, and it was very clear that the sprinkler pipe had burst somewhere.

We noticed, as we ran downstairs, that the whooshing was coming from the second-floor landing to our third-floor bedroom. That landing isn't actually over our own unit, though (see "cultists"), so it wasn't astonishing when we got downstairs and found nothing wrong in our own place. So Kate poked her head out -- and yes, there was water pouring out of every gap in the central hallway ceiling. Not from the sprinklers themselves, mind -- from the light fixture, the smoke alarm, and so on.

The next half-hour was a blur of heart-hammering excitement. Kate and I individually called 911, only to discover that Bill (in Unit A) had beaten us to it and the fire department were on their way. They arrived pretty quickly (yay, city living) and after a few minutes of hunting around, shut off the sprinkler water.

(The poor guys from the FD were a little tired: they had been dealing with burst pipes all day. I gather it was north of 100 in Somerville, and over 500 in Boston. Long, long day.)

Of course, by now we were on to the second half of the crisis: all the water that had poured out in the meantime. The burst pipe was in the hallway, but we all surround that hallway, so it was inevitable that The Waters Would Flow.

In practice, the largest bulk of the water apparently flowed under the basements into our kitchen, which was now one big puddle, so Kate and I gathered up most of the towels in the house to frantically pick up as much as we could. But much of the water did what water will do, and flowed down through the floor, through the insulation, and started dripping all over the back half of the basement -- which is full of my stuff.

So I spent a fair amount of time grabbing boxes that were on the floor, and moving them to higher ground. Fortunately, that wasn't a huge amount of stuff, and most of the important things (eg, books) were on bookcases, safely above the half-inch of water. But still, finding space to relocate a couple dozen boxes, much of my camping gear, and so on, was -- let's just say that I got my exercise for the day in a quick rush.

The fire department, of course, wanted to make sure our unit was safe before they left, and of course the basement was full of dripping water. So they decided to turn off the basement lights for the night, also knocking out the lights to the kitchen. Yay. Time to break out my headlamp.

After the FD left and the initial conversations with the rest of the house were done, Kate decided to try to get a couple more hours of sleep, but I was too freaked out by the standing puddle in the basement. Of course, I don't own a shop vac, so I wound up resorting to more primitive means -- I took a dustpan and an old report binder, and spent forty-five minutes pushing water into the dustpan, then emptying that into a small wash basin, and dumping that outside. Very crude (and wow, my thighs hated me in the morning), but I managed to clear a few gallons of water off the floor, getting it mostly down from "puddle" to "wet".

Around 6am, I finally crawled into bed and crashed.

Sunday

Sunday proper was mainly Triage Day for me. In the immediate crisis I had moved all of the boxes that really mattered, but intentionally ignored the big pile of stuff.

As it turned out, the low point of our basement was exactly where I had been stacking stuff intended for Goodwill. I used to make runs there on a regular basis (there's a big 18-wheeler in a parking lot in Woburn, that serves as a very convenient dropoff), but since Covid started and my mother moved to assisted living I just don't get out that way very often, so the pile had gotten very, very large.

I spent several hours going through all of that, and the damage wasn't as bad as I had initially feared. The pile was 2-3 feet high, and only the stuff directly under drips and right at the bottom had gotten wet. So while I wound up with several contractor bags full of trash from there and the rest of the basement, I managed to salvage more than half of the stuff destined for charity. Knock on wood, almost nothing of real value needed to be trashed.

Only one box was thoroughly wrecked. As I got through the pile, I found the box at the very bottom -- which was labeled "Toxic Waste". It was full of old paint cans and fluorescent light bulbs, destined to be taken to the DPW for disposal. So another small mercy: of all the boxes to get really soaked, that was probably the best one possible.

Other than that, the day was mainly about recovering from probably the most intense adrenaline crash of my life. After the intensity of the early morning, I was pretty much completely spent, almost shaking. There were some odds and ends of returning to normal (getting all of the power and heat back on in our unit), but it was mostly a quiet day.

The Rest of the Week

We then found ourselves in a whirlwind of service people of many sorts -- I think at one point we had the electricians, the sprinkler folks, and ServPro all here at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, the hallway is fairly trashed. It looked fine in the aftermath, but we knew that was an illusion: you don't have that much water (my guess is a few dozen gallons, although it's hard to say) pouring down the ceiling and through the walls without damage.

The electricians came in, cleaned up the breaker box (which had gotten somewhat wet), and installed a new breaker for the basement heat in the hallway, so at least we have that. But they don't want to set up the rest of the power until everything gets cleaned up, so if you come to visit, please be aware that our doorbells are currently out.

Things moved a little slowly over the next few days, because of internal debates in ServPro. We've been working with a team who came up from Georgia to deal with the effects of the cold snap, specifically to work on commercial properties. Our building is a commercial property (since it's a condo building), but the individual units are residential, so the guys on the ground had to convince their management that, since the damage came from the common area, it all counted as a commercial claim.

(And Kate, who manages the condo association, has begun what promises to be a long and aggravating conversation with the building's insurance company, which is demanding every little bit of paperwork that ever existed on the house, just to get things really started.)

The Pipes

By Sunday, I had come to a strong theory about where the burst pipe was. Remember the "whooshing" sound? That was right above a particular place in the common hallway. So when the sprinkler guy came, that was where we had him start.

On the plus side, I was fairly close -- our belief about the location of the break is just a couple of feet away.

On the minus side is that "belief". We now finally understand why that pipe has frozen periodically over the years, and it isn't happy-making.

It turns out that the sprinkler pipe doesn't run down the middle of the hallway, as we had always assumed. Instead, it runs along the wall. Which is an exterior wall for about ten feet, where we have the middle-of-the-house second entrance. Not only that, the pipe runs only an inch or two away from that exterior wall, and is uninsulated. No wonder it's been freezing.

Just to make that worse, the pipe is behind what look like they might be structural joists for the second floor, so it is nearly inaccessible. We're still just guessing about precisely where the break is -- we can't even get a photo yet.

The sprinkler guy was just plain unwilling to go in there -- for good reason, he's not legally allowed to cut anything that might be load-bearing.

So we're now trying to get a general contractor to take a look. Current best guess is that they will have to go in from the outside, to open up the exterior wall so that the sprinkler pipe can be repaired.

Unclear what the next step after that is. Ideally, we'd like to move that pipe to somewhere more interior, but that may be infeasibly difficult and expensive. At the least, we need to blow in some serious foam insulation around that pipe so that it is better protected.

The Bees

Once the legalities got straightened out, ServPro turned their attention to mold mitigation, a process I haven't been through before. They are impressively serious about it.

They're trying hard to dry out our kitchen and basement "in-place", without having to do anything destructive. So our kitchen is currently filled with an industrial-strength dehumifier (the size of a small refrigerator) and four serious shop-grade fans, kicking up a constant vortex of wind.

This is amazingly loud. It's not horrible -- pure white noise at a moderate-frequency hum, so it's not painful -- but it is loud enough that, if I speak at normal volume in the kitchen, I literally cannot hear myself at all. It's quite audible from our second-floor den even with the door closed, and from our third-floor bedroom if the door is open.

Due to the buzzy/hummy character of the noise, Kate has designated it "The Bees", and that's simply how we're referring to it.

Fortunately, ServPro are being very sensible about it all -- we had a small gathering yesterday for my birthday, and I got the okay for me to take down the Bees for the duration of the party, and put them back up afterwards. (They're well-designed, and easy to move around.)

Lots More to Come

So that's more or less the state of things. ServPro come back tomorrow to do a mold assessment. Hopefully they've managed to shut down the problem, but odds are that at the least we're going to need to replace a bunch of insulation in our unit, and quite possibly replace the flooring in the kitchen. (Which has warped noticeably.)

The hallway is now more visibly a wreck. They've cut away the bottom few feet of the drywall, and have four more Bees blowing at the walls to dehumidify the interior. If we're lucky, we'll only have to replace the hallway-side walls, not our interior kitchen walls. (Which would require taking down several wall-mounted cabinets.)

Overall: yay for competent contractors -- I'll particularly compliment the ServPro team as friendly, available, and attentive to detail. But I suspect it's going to be months before we have everything repaired and fully buttoned up...