Heat wins over ice
The water pipe was still frozen today. No surprise, given that the temperature locally has been below what we call zero up here for weeks now. It does complicate life for the fifty-odd employees. We were summoned to the conference room within the first hour, told that the problem would be fixed once the city maintenance workers started their work day and given some alternatives.
We could leave until noon and come back after checking on the status, or we could play the invisible card that all good civil servants keep in their top drawer; remain out of sight and mind in case the health and safety inspectors happened onsite and work as best we could while deprived of sanitation or coffee. Give credit; everybody stayed on, driven to not fall further behind on the treadmill of office life. I had to test alternative methods of streaming audio and video, so once the flurry of phone calls had passed I was able to do some serious comparative testing.
I’m always curious about how others solve problems. In the case of a frozen water main, the city hauls in a portable generator. Attaching one end of the “jumper cable” to the street valve, the other end is dragged through windows and doorways until the water entrance in a sub-basement. At one point, the specialist used his megger and determined that he was running over 300 amps of current through the buried copper. Heat wins over ice. Within the hour, we had running water in the building.
The only catch is that this is considered as a temporary fix to a sustained problem. We now have to let the taps run in one of the utility rooms until next spring. Last year, the constant-flush system in the mens’ room was replaced by some fancy electronic detectors, and several decades of water waste ended. We now know the result.
