What is more fun than sandpapering the rear-end of an aligator in a phone booth? Oooh! ooh! I know! Pick me! How about a lagoon-esque flooding of a crawl space discovered in 6F weather at midnight after a long weekend of traveling and partying ? You betcha!

Poor Portana’s crawl space was flooded from a burst cold water pipe when we returned. We knew the pipes had frozen the morning we left, but we couldn’t really do anything about it as she was babysitting her rockstar boyfriend in his morning of Retchery and we had to get packed and to the airport. We did have some family members check in on it, but the main shutoff was frozen and couldn’t be closed. We figured that two days of good luck might hold through, but alas it twas not to be. Walking into her house and turning on the kitchen faucet rewarded us with hot & cold water — the hot just a trickle, but at least running. The bathroom…well the hot water trickeled as well, but the cold water just made an ominous gurgling sound. A quick check with my Super Sniffer 2000(tm) confirmed that we were standing over a yet to be determined quanity of stagnant water.

Popping open the crawl space access (external to the house) showed us that we were mere feet away from having a very nice house-boat. There was 2 to 2.5 feet of water just sitting there, all icy and cold looking. My external thermometer was not looking forward to a Polar Bear experience. After finding out there are NO 24hr plumbers in Billings that have pumping equipment (seriously, what kind of fuck ass town is this sometimes!), we rang up one of my friends who had an irrigation pump. We tried to get some water pumping out, but at 2am we were just making a big icy mess of her yard. A call later to the public utilities company here got the water shutoff. We called it a night — there was no immediate danger to stay up and play Ahab. Oh — forgot to mention: The main water shutoff for the house is on the other side of the crawl space, on the other side of the swirling mess.

Revisting the pond this morning found the water level down about 2 feet. I fired up the pump again to move a bit more mud around, but at the end of the morning I left about 6″ of water standing. Thankfully the crawlspace is all dirt, so we are going for the “what goes up must come down” method of home repair. I’ll check in tomorrow to see if it is dry enough to slop around and examine the damage — so far it looks like one minor break in the bathroom cold water feed. A soldering job and we should be back in business. All-in-all, it turned out to be not quite as catastrophic as we had anticipated…so far!