File it under: It could have been worse...

We've been in below freezing weather for a couple of weeks now, more snow than I've ever seen here in Duvall before, and it's been snowing since last night. We thought we were snug in our house, wood stove doing it's job, plenty of wood on the porch, no problems. I'd walked the yard the day before looking for problems with our hose bibbs, but they all looked fine. I suppose I should have looked closer, but even still I wouldn't have seen the problem.

I got up around 8:30 this morning, Rita had been up for a while & decided to go back to bed for a bit. I walked downstairs, fed Lola, and settled in to check my boat in the Volvo Ocean Race Game & watch the news on the tube. After a while, I heard a hissing, whumping sound that went on for a while. It sounded like snow sliding off the roof to me, so when it quickly stopped, I soon stopped worrying about it. After half an hour or so, I got up to take a leak & heard more hissing & the sound of water running...in the garage! I quickly opened the door & saw water spraying from behind my wood storage rack. Fortunately I knew where our house shut off was & shut the valve. I was never so glad to hear water stop running.

I surveyed the damage, most of the spray had been contained by plywood (BS 1088 waterproof wood even), but my tool box with battery chargers & precision measuring instruments was soaked, great. Rita had gotten up by this time and was actually brushing her teeth when I shut off the water. She came down to tell me about it, and I told her the bad news. I knew there was a valve on the same wall as the leak, so I had her climb underneath my work bench & shut off the valve, then I opened the main valve on the other side of the garage. Silence, perfect, we wouldn't have to join Lola squatting in the yard, and also wouldn't have to try to find a plumber on a very snowy Sunday.

The cleanup was reasonably straight forward, but I'd accumulated a bunch of wood since I first bult the rack, so it was about as full as it could get. Plus there was a bunch of other stuff that had accreted over the years. Rita & I moved all the stuff out away from the front of the rack & started moving the water towards the garage door. This sounds simple, but remember it'd been snowing for days, and the snow was right up to the garage door. Sweep the water out the door, and it seeps right back in out of the sponge-like snow. I finally swept a bunch of snow out away from the door a couple of feet, and that was enough to keep it out. Rita manned the leaf blower to move the water from where the broom couldn't reach, and I swept the rest out the door. The leaf blower does a great job of moving lots of water, so the job was over with fairly quickly. I blew out all of the drawers in the tool box to get the majority of the water out. Fortunately there was little in the top box where the precision stuff was, but the bottom drawer had about half an inch in it. Sears was smart enough to include drain holes in all of the drawers, so getting the water out was pretty easy once the tool pads were removed.

Here's the site of the leak, I haven't torn away the drywall yet to find the actual culprit, the only pipe that seems affected is our out front hose bibb, and it's not like we're likely to use that any time soon. I've got our blower running across the floor and the water's mostly dried up, plus the propane heater's cooking away to dry out all the wood & various & sundry other things that got soaked in the half hour or so shower that corner of the garage went through.

The good news & bad news:
The garage floor is cleaner than it's been in a while, but there's about to be a big hole in the dry wall.

Having BS 1088 plywood against the wall in the rack was pure luck, but it kept hundreds of dollars of wood mostly protected from the spray, but it's still going to take a long time to get everything dried out.

Holes in the drawers of my toolbox were a good idea by whoever designed the box, but again, it's going to take a while to dry everything out.

I'm glad we were home when it happened, imagine the damage done if it'd been running all day? I went & looked at the hose bibb to see if it showed any signs of distress or freezing, nothing. So I don't feel too guilty about not finding the problem before it got to this point. Also, it's inside a wall that's between our front porch and the garage, there's no insulation between them, so it's not overly surprising that it was the one to burst, but I'd never thought of where the pipe was before, so I'm still not sure what I could have done to prevent it.

So, all in all, it could have been lots worse. I'm really glad I knew where the water shut off was, otherwise we'd still be fighting it, or digging up the meter box out front to get to it from there.