The story starts yesterday morning. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and we were planning to throw another World Food/World Peace event the next evening, for which we had to cook a sizeable amount of food, and our water wasn't working. It's not that uncommon for out water to get turned off- in the summer we don't have water for at least part of the day 4 or 5 days a week. So, when we woke up that morning and non of our taps were working, I wasn't particularly surprised or concerned- the water usually comes back on in a few hours. I was frustrated, though, when by 2 o'clock that afternoon the water still hadn't turned back on. We had to start prepping food for dinner the next night, and that would be really hard to do without running water to wash dirty dishes or hands. So, as we were still waterless, we postponed the kitchen-based prepwork and decided to head out on a grocery shopping trip that we had planned to make the next morning...
We had been signed up for a grand total of 4 dishes between the two of us. Kate, our site-mate and the main instigator of the mean that was to come the following evening, was going to cook two more. Originally, Kate had wanted the three of us to prepare the entire meal, but thankfully we had talked her into splitting the cost of booking an event space in the Basen Hotel, and having them serve the bulk of the food in the form of traditional Armenian Khorovats (usually translated: barbeque)- which is the meal that Armenians eat at every holiday and special occasion. This left us three responsible for preparing a few key American side dishes and desserts.
Kate was making corn pudding and a cake shaped like a turkey (we decided that providing an actual turkey- or 5 because the turkeys here are sized more like large chickens than US turkeys- would be a little bit pricey). Sam was making two varieties of stuffing (one with vegetables, one with sweet Italian sausage) and honey glazed carrots. For my part, I was supplying pumpkin bread and apple crisp. All together, this had the makings of a good Thanksgiving meal, but it was going to be a lot of work, and that would be compounded if they didn't turn out water back on soon...
We finished our errands around 4 o'clock, and we were hiking back up the high hill to our house- lugging with us four 6L jugs of water. We had a 5 gallon bucket filled for emergency toilet flushing water back home, but we didn't want to cook with water that had been sitting in an open bucket in the bathroom for a week. As we approached our house, I saw one of our neighbors walking along the street.
"Excuse me-" I said, "Is you water working?"
Our neighbor gave me a quizzical look. "Yes," she replied, "is your water not working?"
"No, we haven't had water all day." I said.
"Ahh," our neighbor nodded knowingly, "Your pipes are frozen. You have to leave your water running overnight so they don't freeze."
"Well, fuck" I said. Not really. But I thought it real hard. Instead we thanked our neighbor and dragged our now precious bottled water inside the house to think up a game plan.
The problem was this: we didn't actually know where our water pipes entered our house. We knew where the shut-off valve and usage meter were located (out by the street, about 60 feet from the house ,in a 2 foot deep pit covered by a metal lid), and we knew where our taps in the house were- but the path between points A and B was a complete mystery to us. So, even if we had a plan to heat up the points that were frozen, we had no idea where to find them. In the rapidly gathering dusk, we set this issue aside for a moment and decided to focus on the problem of heat transfer.
The method we settled on- which I think was rather clever of us- was to take our 5 gallons of emergency toilet flush water, boil it in our tea kettle, and fill all the empty soda bottles that I had saved out of a compulsive hoarding habit I seem to have developed in this resource poor environment. Once this was accomplished, we took these make-shift hot water bottles and packed them around the water pipe at the shut-off valve by the street, since that was the only place where we knew to find out pipes. Then we went back inside the house to wait.
It was at this time, around 5 in the evening, that I finally got started prepping the 30-odd cups of shopped apples that I'd need for 25 servings of apple crisp. I'll admit that I took great pleasure from the fact that all the apples I used for this meal came from the apple trees in our garden, and that Sam and I had picked them ourselves about a month prior. I was also pleased that- except for a small dish in which to rinse my sticky fingers, the peeling and chopping of apples required no water.
After about 30 minutes of waiting, we still had no running water, and it was getting close to full dark. Convinced that this shut-off valve hadn't been the problem, Sam strapped on a headlamp and headed out into the night to search for the point at which our water pipes might enter our house. After poking around for 15 or 20 minutes, he still hadn't found the entry point, but he did find a segment of pipe that was close to the house and had only been covered by a few inches of sandy soil. Figuring that this seemed like a point at which the pipe could have froze, Sam decided to build a fire on top of the pipe segment to thaw the ice inside it.
We let the fire burn for about 45 minutes, watching our open faucets with bated breath. It was straight up night now, and getting colder every minute. After almost an hour of fire time, we still didn't have any running water, and we still had a crap-ton of Thanksgiving prep work to do. Disheartened, Sam decided to let the fire die down. Once it was down to embers, the began to kick sand over them and spread them apart to put the fire out for good. It was at this point, as he was kicking the sand surrounding the pipe, that a geyser of water shot up from beneath his foot, soaking everything in the immediate vicinity, including Sam.
Apparently, the pipe was made from PVC (or similar), and while the heat from the fire hadn't succeeded in melting whatever ice was blocking our water supply, it had succeeded in melting a small hole through the pipe wall. As I ran back to the street to turn the water supply to our house off at the valve there, and Sam went inside to change into some dry clothes, we reflected on this new development. On the plus side, the melted segment of the pipe was very close to our house, and given the pressure with which the geyser shot forth from the hole, the frozen segment of pipe was almost certainly 'down-stream' of the melted point. This narrowed our search for the frozen pipe segment considerably. On the other hand, our pipes were still frozen, and now we had a hole in one of them as well.
Given, this- and the fact that it was cold, dark, and now wet outside, we decided to give up on the "thaw our pipes" project for the evening and focus on Thanksgiving food prep sans water. However, as luck would have it, about 30 minutes into that project the electricity cut out, leaving us in the dark, with no running water, and a boat load of cooking yet to be done. Finally defeated, we took the hint the universe was sending to us, and climbed into bed that night with full confidence that things would be better in the morning, if only because it wouldn't be pitch black in our living room by then.
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