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ThadisJones t1_j9rt8jp wrote

Look on the bright side, at least you didn't drill into:

  • A hot water line
  • A steam heating line
  • A live electrical conduit
  • The pipe that goes from your bathroom to the sewer
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EllieBelly_24 t1_j9secsh wrote

When it hit -25 in nova scotia the other week, the hot water pipe in my partner's apartment froze and burst when it thawed. It ended up draining all the hot water as the landlord didn't know how to turn off the water ><

As a bonus, the breaker box was in the same little dugout in the wall as the water heater, and the pipe burst perfectly to spray directly onto it.

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ThadisJones t1_j9tdnso wrote

In 2015 my city had a prolonged bout of extreme cold and snow, and a pipe burst in the building my company leases. The leak was directly above the main transformer for the building, which shorted and exploded, causing a fire. I got The Mother Of All Texts at 5am from my lab monitoring systems screaming that every fucking thing had switched to UPS power or was offline.

I raced into work in a blizzard and started our shutdown/tie-in protocol. The building owners ended up renting a truck-mounted generator for a week and parking it in the loading dock to provide emergency heating, emergency lights, and emergency power for critical equipment.

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