From Boston Globe reporters Travis Andersen and Jessica Bartlett:

The brutally cold weather that descended on the region last weekend caused pipes to burst at scores of homes and public venues, setting off a scramble for plumbing and repair help.

“I don’t have any hot water, but I do have very cold water,” said Keira Driscoll, 34, of Watertown, describing the bleak situation Monday inside her condo after hot water pipes burst in her bathroom over the weekend.

Some water, Drsicoll said, was even “coming forward into my kitchen.”

The water was shut off and when she called her maintenance contractor Sunday morning he said her property was the 19th address on the street having problems.

“It’s looking like Tuesday of next week,” before workers can clean up the damage, she said. “And then I’m probably going to have to have my ceiling torn down. The wood floors got a ton of water [damage] underneath, so it looks like those might be coming up too.”

The cold front brought extreme temperatures and wind chills as low as 30 degrees below zero in Boston, forecasters said, freezing pipes across the region.

Carl Jonasson, owner of C.H. Jonasson Corp., a Needham-based plumbing, heating, and air conditioning contractor, said he’s prioritizing regular customers, who can probably get a repair scheduled within a couple of days. Everyone else should prepare to wait.

“For non-regular customers, it could be a week or two,” Jonasson said Monday. “Most plumbers aren’t even picking up the phone now.”

In Haverhill, firefighters were called Monday to a condominium complex on Casablanca Street, where they cleaned up water damage from a unit whose owner was out of town, said Jennifer Piazza, a resident of the complex.

The same thing had happened earlier at another unit, she said.

“It looked like they kind of just tried to contain the water,” Piazza said of firefighters who arrived Monday.

Among the businesses that sustained water damage was the restaurant Little Donkey, located in Cambridge’s Central Square.

On Saturday, chef and co-owner Jamie Bissonnette posted a video clip of water gushing from a leak in the restaurant’s ceiling and wrote that the restaurant would be “closed for maintenance.

On Monday, Bissonnette said the restaurant would reopen Monday evening after crews worked through the weekend to fix the leak.

“It’s a tough pill to swallow,” Bissonnette said.

Read more of the story — with no paywall: https://www.boston.com/news/the-boston-globe/2023/02/07/most-plumbers-arent-even-picking-up-the-phone-now-burst-pipes-cause-backlog-after-boston-deep-freeze/