{"id":5382,"date":"2011-02-04T14:11:01","date_gmt":"2011-02-04T21:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5382"},"modified":"2011-02-04T15:15:15","modified_gmt":"2011-02-04T22:15:15","slug":"no-make-that-the-great-freezing-drought-of-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5382","title":{"rendered":"Tucson Ill-Equipped to Handle Cold Weather; Shocking Details at Eleven"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When I wrote yesterday’s post<\/a>, I didn’t know the half of it.\u00a0 Oh, I knew the water and heat were out.\u00a0 That much was obvious.\u00a0 What I didn’t know was that when the water would come back on two pipes would burst, and that we might not have heat again until Monday or Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The water came back on about an hour after I posted yesterday’s entry.\u00a0 Although our outdoor pipes are wrapped and hadn’t frozen, the sudden return of pressure caused a poppet valve on top of one outdoor standpipe to shoot off into space and a geyser of water to come blasting out.\u00a0 Luckily that pipe has a shutoff valve and I caught the leak quickly, and Ace Hardware — which was mobbed<\/em> — had a replacement valve.<\/p>\n

I made it to Ace and back in 15 minutes and had the valve replaced 5 minutes later.\u00a0 But on my way back into the house I saw a fast-growing pool of water on the ground around our pool pump enclosure.\u00a0 Pipes inside the pool heater had burst and water was gushing out the sides.\u00a0 I temporarily stopped that leak by turning the pool pump off, removing pressure from the pipe.\u00a0 Most likely we’ll have to replace the heater, and for now I’m leaving the pump off.\u00a0 With a little luck it’ll warm up today and over the weekend, and the exposed plastic pipes going to and from the pool pump and filter won’t freeze.<\/p>\n

But we aren’t done yet.\u00a0 It turns out the gas outage is more serious than we initially thought.\u00a0 According to Southwest Gas, our local utility, there was such a demand for natural gas in Tucson Wednesday night and Thursday morning they had to shut the supply off to certain neighborhoods to prevent a total outage. Over 14,000 Tucson homes have no gas<\/a>, and we live in one of them.<\/p>\n

Since last night was forecast to be as cold as the night before (down to 17\u00b0 F), we cashed in some goodwill stamps with friends across town, friends with benefits (the benefits being extra bedrooms and functioning heat).\u00a0 If you have friends (and I assume you do, lots of them), treat them well and be there for them when they need you, because you never know when you’re going to need them!<\/p>\n

So we spent the night at Frank and Sue’s.\u00a0 Donna and Polly are off at work today and I’m back home, alone in our cold house, hoping the gas people will come by.\u00a0 They have to go into each affected neighborhood to turn the gas off at the meter at each of those 14,000-plus homes, restart the gas supply to those neighborhoods, then come back to each individual home to turn the gas back on — and then come inside each home to relight the pilot lights!\u00a0 This could take a while, and we might have to sleep over at Frank and Sue’s again.\u00a0\u00a0 But for now I’m here, hunkered down with all the pets in the home office with a little electric space heater on the floor, wearing a sweater, a coat, and my old Alaskan USAF-issue furry hat.<\/p>\n

And what do you know, the gas people are in our neighborhood, going from house to house turning off the gas!\u00a0 With luck, they’ll be back later today to turn it back on and we’ll have heat tonight.\u00a0 But I’ll try to be understanding if it takes longer than that — 14,000 homes is a lot of homes!<\/p>\n

They say our unusually cold winter is a symptom of global warming<\/a> — which they should have called global climate change because the dummies seize upon every snowflake as evidence that Al Gore is fat — and that means the continued warming of the Arctic Ocean will result in more harsh winters in North America and Europe.\u00a0 Obviously, Tucson’s water and gas infrastructure wasn’t able to handle one night of sub-freezing temperatures, and now we can be pretty sure the infrastructure will be tested again and again, this winter and in future winters.\u00a0 Will the utility companies do anything about it?\u00a0 Long experience in aviation (where mass fatalities must occur before safety improvements are ever made) tells me they won’t, and that I’d better rewrap my pipes, lay in another space heater or two, and maybe buy a generator.<\/p>\n

Every winter I read about people freezing to death in their homes during gas or electricity outages in the Midwest and Northeast.\u00a0 Who would have thought (he asked, doing his best Condoleezza Rice impersonation) it could happen here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I wrote yesterday’s post, I didn’t know the half of it.\u00a0 Oh, I knew the water and heat were out.\u00a0 That much was obvious.\u00a0 What I didn’t know was that when the water would come back on two pipes would burst, and that we might not have heat again until Monday or Tuesday. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5382"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5386,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5382\/revisions\/5386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}