It is Tuesday and time to write a 'Slice of Life."
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How to describe the sound? So quiet it overwhelms, and wakes you in the middle of the night. It is a strange kind of echo, the sound of water flowing, a ‘white noise,’ steady and resounding, and you will jump from bed to investigate. What is that?!
While we were away on vacation, our next door neighbors watched our home for us, collecting any stray packages from the doorstep and making sure that all was well while we traveled. We have great neighbors, and we do this for one another whenever one of us is out of town. We checked in with them a time or two by text, mostly to send a braggy photo or two of our fun travels. Then they texted back their dilemma:
They heard the sound of water running, yet no sign of water. They searched upstairs and downstairs, turned on and off faucets, double-checked the laundry area: no surprise water anywhere.
We texted back immediately, to double-check their words – Wait, your house or our house? Who has this problem?
Ours is the frightened response of people who have “been there, done that.” We knew exactly what the problem was: a pinhole leak in the water pipes to one’s home. You hear water running, flowing, gushing. You see nothing. It is eerie.
Good news for us, it is their home that is having the problem. Bad news for them, we were right: pinhole leaks. And, unfortunately, their leak is causing such a severe flow of water, the WSSC cut off the water supply to their home. I feel so badly that they are having this dreaded experience.
All the water pipes in our neighborhood are quite old. Most of the homes were built between 1935-1945, and the pipes are galvanized metal. These do not age well, rusting out and forming holes. Water gushes into the ground, invisible to the eye, only something one can hear. The pipes must be replaced, which is a labor intensive task requiring the digging of a deep trench. (Here’s a question – is it really an improvement that old galvanized pipes are replaced with some new thick polyvinyl? We all know the wonders of plastic in our water…but I digress.)
If the leak is in the part of the pipe between your yard and the street, where the main water lines are, that’s a county problem and they must pay for the repair. However, if the leak is in your yard…ugh….
If only one home hears the water flowing, chances are close to excellent that the leak is in that one yard.
Our education about pinhole leaks occurred right before my husband’s 50th birthday party, when we had tons of people coming to the house to celebrate. You could see the usage dial spinning on the water meter, yet there was no evidence of water leaking inside our home. Our water pressure deteriorated. We called WSSC with fingers crossed that this was a county issue, but that was not to be. The plumbers dug an enormous ditch through the front yard, in order to make the repair. The repair took several days, straddling the birthday party. On the bright side, we were able to keep our water on, in the house; I don’t know that we could have had a party without it. The yard, however, was a disaster. I remember the plumber put sawhorses around the cavernous trench, to keep children away, and I believe I added celebratory balloons to these, for a chuckle.
Our neighbors didn’t have the added hassle of a bunch of partygoers coming to the house, but they had the terrible timing of hosting a friend from Texas. Hosting company for several days and no running water? Oh my.
One cannot function without water.
We didn’t hesitate; we insisted they take over our home while we were away – use the kitchen, take showers, collect water, run laundry, whatever you need. It is now a whole week later, we are back home, their guest is gone, and their repair has still not been made. The plumber cannot work on the fix until the county issues a permit, and there has been a delay in acquiring this.
The neighbors are eating lots of takeout, filling big buckets with water from our hose to run their toilets, and keeping their spirits up as best they can; it is good that they don’t have young children underfoot, I think. We gave them a spare key to our basement, and insisted they come and go as they need. This area of our home was more or less ‘an apartment’ for our boys as they became young adults; there is a full bathroom down there, the laundry room, and a separate door to enter/exit. Our neighbors always send a text before coming over, though we insist there is no need for a heads up – our children never did this for us, lol!
In the early morning, one might notice someone ‘sneaking’ out of our home with a backpack of clothes over their shoulder, slipping across the driveway into their own back door.
I wonder if other neighbors are wagging their tongues at the sight?
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