Walked on balcony.
Saw a lizard; it got scared.
The lizard jumped! Splat.
My first haiku
2
Burst water mains
I came home from work yesterday and noticed water bubbling out of our courtyard pavers. Our Strata has been investigating where leaks might be for nearly a year, due to some extremely high usage water bills. I’ve been advocating for individual water meters to be installed so that we can more easily and more rapidly identify where leaks are coming from, rather than waiting for them to burst up through the ground. Ironically, we’ve had a burst in our own courtyard from the mains supply.
So it was all fixed, and the ‘quick drying glue’ only needed 10 minutes to dry. They waited 40 minutes to be really sure, and then turned the water back on. One of the two plumbers stuck his head into the hole to have a good look.
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- Galvanised steel pipe section removed, which from this section onwards was PVC in all directions. The plumber said it seemed odd that there was a galvanised steel section. All the dirt you see on the pipe is not dirt, its rust! You can barely see through the pipe itself, its also full of rust. Unbelievable that it didn’t burst any earlier.
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- This is the neat and tidy completed job, waiting for the glue to dry, before turning it back on.
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- The leak that sprung out of our courtyard
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- Work in progress
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- Leak coming from the mains pipe, just before it tees off to our house. There is also the sewer with an inspection point going diagonally across, as well as the gas supply going up-down the photo.
So it was all looking really good and promising, until just as the second plumber came back from turning the mains back on, it exploded into a fire hose like fountain, going as high as our townhouse two-storey roof. It was like a scene from an action movie when a truck runs over a fire hydrant. In this video I perfectly captured the moment that the plumber realised he would be working through well past dinner time to restore water to 30 townhouses, but please excuse my language!
Needless to say we went out for dinner tonight, whilst the plumbers worked away hard re-doing it all again. Large rocks were used to hold the (somewhat flexible) mains water pipe into position to prevent the tee-off from ejecting itself from the pipe again. Water is back on, and they’re coming back tomorrow to reinstate the courtyard.
All is well.
tomandmorven.org
This blog has finally been relocated to tomandmorven.org, having been at tombammann.org for many years before Morven and I were even engaged. We bought the domain name a couple of years ago before we got married, although it’s been an exciting and fun-filled marriage, so it’s taken me some time to move it across. If you notice any issues please let us know.
Morven has expressed interest in blogging once it has been moved, so we can all look forward to Morven blogging sometime soon.