(click on picture to enlarge if you'd like to see more details of the mud...)What a bummer of a week! On Saturday when James mowed the lawn there were some muddy spots...not too out of the ordinary. By Monday it was a muddy cesspool. After some troubleshooting, a call to a septic tank repair service and having our system pumped, we were led to discover we had a leak in the water main from the road to our house.
So, at 8 pm Monday night, I had all the kids go "potty" and filled the tub full of water for the County Water Emergency guy to turn off our water. We were losing 5-6 gallons of water per minute. (Can't wait to get that water bill...)
Yesterday I spent a good part of the day on the phone to the Health Department (got a map of our land), the utilities companies to have them mark power lines, etc. and back and forth with James to make sure had all our bases covered. By noon we were set to have a contractor dig to find the pipe that had burst. After 2+ hours of digging (on the hottest day of the year to-date) Rick came to the door with a section of pipe. Then after 2 more hours, he was able to turn on the water and have it NOT leak. What a day...
Tomorrow he'll be back to fill in those HUGE trenches he dug. (Our water line was well below the 2-foot freeze line...more like 5 feet underground.) Then we'll tackle the problem of a septic tank pump that most likely is toast after trying to pump all that water continuously all weekend long. A few bags of grass seed after that will complete the task.
Needless to say, we've had better weeks. It was an adventure not having water, a little eye-opening to what we would need to have in a real emergency. It's probably just what we needed to follow through with our plan to buy some 50-gallon drums.
1 comment:
Wow...that's awful! I am so sorry for you guys...it's a pain taking care of those kind of problems! I am glad you have it fixed now (mostly)! 5-6 gallons/minute?...HOLY COW--that's a BIG leak! (don't you just hate spending money on stuff like that?)
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