Water is back on

[lblanchard]

My first waking thought, after "jeez but my hair stinks," was "so is there water?" It was a wonderful moment when I turned on the bathroom tap and lovely clear water gushed out.

I took a lovely long shower, yum, and wandered into the third floor kitchen. The tap belched and groaned and delivered itself of some water that was absolutely black. No clue what that was about, so I let it run for a couple minutes and then it was clear and smelled exactly like my usual Schuylkill Punch. So all is well.

Except on 21st Street, where the leaky water main has caused a ginormous sinkhole that is threatening both gas and electric service for some undetermined number of households. The Water Department can't proceed with its work until the other utilities are secured. Some homeowners are going to be pretty miserable for several days.

Some friends of ours who lived close to Ground Zero took on five feet of water in their basement. They were philosophical: "we were talking about going through all that crap and getting rid of most of it anyhow."

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Oh man...
How long was your water off? I've been away so I might have missed something?

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Not long. Overnight. But it's a huge water main break, among the worst Philadelphia has ever had, and it spewed 10-15 million gallons of water into our neighborhood. I'm now a little nervous about the rest of that century-old water main. It runs down 21st Street, a scant six rowhomes from us. If it had broken on Christian instead of Bainbridge, we'd have lost everything in our basement, and possibly had foundation damage as well.