Big excitement in my neighborhood yesterday! There was a water main break over by our park!

There is more coverage of it in the local news. You will see in the news coverage that we had a water main break last year, too. Last year’s water main break happened maybe 50 feet from this one, but the city claims that this is just a coincidence. If you look at enough local news coverage of yesterday’s water main break, you’ll find comments from NIMBYs who assert that the way that this neighborhood has changed from single family homes to multi-family buildings over the past century is what is causing the water main breaks. The arguments put forward in support of this position are inconsistent with my understanding of water infrastructure, but I am not an expert.

The real decision I had to make, though, was whether it was better to go to work and get my car out of the rising water or if it was better to stay at home and not drive through disconcertingly deep water. There were parts of the street that were really quite flooded.

alley

I did end up going to work. It is possible that instead of 100% working all of the day that I did take the time to call my homeowner’s insurance to let them know about this situation. My apartment is on the second floor, so the only possible damage would be to my heat pump (a/c unit). Since the outdoor part of the unit is outside all of the time and gets rained on (especially in places where it rains), I suspect that it has a certain amount of indifference to water. No idea how well rain resistance translates to flood resistance. Also, my a/c unit is over 30 years old, so even if this flood brings about its demise, I’d kind of expected that I’d have to replace it at some point in the next few years.

When I came home, I went to go look at the hole in the ground where the pipe was. some people are calling this a sink hole, but I feel that is an unfair characterization of the situation.

hole