The power went out for the first time in years at their house a few weeks back, so he had occasion to actually fire that sucker up. (Fire being the operative word.) The exhaust system trapped enough heat after two hours of run time to catch the sidewall of the building on fire. And that baby lit up like a torch, shooting flames 30 feet high. Fortunately, the surrounding tree limbs were green enough to just scorch, and not burn.
When the fire department arrived, Dad quickly warned them of the 36 gallons of gasoline (for the generator) stored in plastic cans inside that flaming shed. The fire was put out by the fire department, saving the trees, the deck and ultimately their house. After all the furor, the gas cans were inspected; the tops were melted in a grotesque manner. In one can, I could see gas sloshing around where the top had melted away.
The second calamity was entirely my fault. As regular readers will recall, over the past year I have spent almost every weekend, and every dollar to my name, completely remodeling and refurbishing a six-unit apartment building in and out. Four of the six were complete, and they came out looking great, I must say.
After the last inherited tenant moved out, I gutted his top-floor unit and was going to start on the rebuild. One of the many early projects was to replace the 26-year-old angle-stop valves beneath each plumbing fixture. The basic copper plumbing was not an issue, but the old valves were prone to drips.
I turned the water off to the entire building. To drain the water out, I opened the sink valves in the lower unit. Next I took the hacksaw and got to work cutting off the old valves. After installing five of the seven new valves, I encountered a pipe that had been partly crushed by the plumber doing the initial dishwasher installation back in the days of the Carter administration.
This crushed pipe was out of round badly enough that it would not accept the nut or the ferrule (the "washer" in a compression fitting that makes the seal to the valve body). No more could be cut off the pipe without busting into the drywall. It needed a coupling and extension — parts I didn't have with me.
Tired, wet, cranky and hungry, I decided to bag it to go home and study the inside of my eyelids. The clouded thinking was that I would leave the water off to the whole building and get the needed parts rounded up the following weekend.
Next weekend I showed up to a flood as I opened the door to the lower unit. The newly remodeled lower unit! The ceiling in the kitchen and bathroom had fallen down, directly above the missing valves in the upper-floor unit. The new carpet was sopping wet, and the vinyl floor had buckled. After adding my tears to the deluge, I went upstairs to find water everywhere, having buckled the new underlayment plywood. Even the crawlspace was not immune from the ever-present hand of gravity and water; it had a couple of inches of water, also. Water was coming out of the open pipes at a rapid drip, so I went to the water meter in the street and shut that valve down. Let two strong drips go for a week, and you get one heckuva lot of water. Where did the water come from? Had someone gone down into the crawlspace and turned it back on in an act of spite? No. The distinction is in the type of valve, believe it or not — gate valves and ball valves. A gate valve is most common and the type most of us are familiar with. They have round handles and turn three or four turns to close.
Hose spigots, main-water shutoffs and angle-stop valves are usually gate valves. A screw inside the valve comes down into a seat and slowly closes off the opening. A gate valve is the type I closed in the crawlspace, and the chronically dripping type I was replacing in each apartment. A ball valve takes a single 90- or 180-degree turn to completely open or close. Typically, ball valves have a small lever or handle, lacking the round grip. A Teflon-coated ball simply turns inside the valve body.
The seat inside a gate valve can wear, and/or accumulate mineral deposits or other imperfections that prevent it from fully closing. My valve was not fully closing, and my brain was not fully operating to recognize this. No water was detected while working, since I drained the system in the lower unit. After I left, the water filled back up and overflowed.
Had I turned off the ball valve at the meter in the street, you would be reading about something entirely different today, and I would be several hundred dollars richer.
No — no insurance claim was made, not even a phone call to the insurance company. Under the current insurance climate, CLUE (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange) reports of water damage are a plague that will follow the owner and the building in a negative way for years. Use caution with water claims, and realize that any claim will be made up for financially by the insurance company many times over.
Next week: The repair, and another leak.
Darrell Hay answers readers' questions. Call 206-464-8514 to record your question |
