“Mr. O’Hara, could you please give me a call back? We’ve had an incident in your backyard.”
I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it before on the blog, but we’re having a shop built in the backyard at our new home. This was a decision we made before we ever bought the new house. I’ve wanted one for a long time, and Susan has wanted a garage she can park inside for a long time. So, win/win.
We found the perfect builder, a local man who actually lives in our old neighborhood. “The minute our old house sells,” we told him, “we’ll cut you the first check.” None of us expected it to take nine months for our old house to sell. Here we are a year later, just getting started.
Allow me to define “getting started” — you see, before our builder can do much of anything, everything underneath where the building will sit needs to be relocated. And while logically I picked a great spot for the new building (right at the end of our driveway), logistically, it’s a mess. Pretty much everything that could possibly run underground in my backyard is buried there. That includes my electrical lines, my cable connection, and the water lines that run to my sprinkler. Before construction on the foundation can begin, all of those things need to move.
Before anyone digs anything, you have to call 811. These are the people who come out and stick flags all over your yard, telling you where you can and cannot dig. My backyard currently has at least 40 flags in it. There are red flags marking my electrical lines, blue flags marking my sprinkler lines, orange lines marking my cable line, white flags marking where the electrical lines need to move to, and yellow lines marking my gas line. Oh, and we put down some more flags to mark off where the building will eventually go. Ask the guy who mows my lawn; there are no shortage of flags in my backyard.
So, the incident.
The message left on my phone came from an OG&E contractor, who was in the process of moving my electric line. When I called him back, he informed me that while digging up my electrical lines, they severed the main water line that ran to my sprinkler system. To prevent water from spraying everywhere, they turned off the water to my house. When I asked how long this would take to fix, he told me he was not responsible for fixing it because it wasn’t marked properly.
When I asked him what I was supposed to do, his exact words to me were, “I don’t know… call a plumber?”
On the way home, I asked the man to repeat the story to me three times, just to make sure I had the details correct. Despite calling 811, and despite having a yard full of flags (including flags that clearly show where the sprinkler lines were buried), this man was not responsible for fixing the cut water line, and I no longer have water in my home.
Did I mention Susan was in Washington D.C. this week?
Did I mention it was 92 degrees when I got home from work on Wednesday?
After picking up Morgan from school, the two of us stopped and bought two cases of bottled water — overkill, yes, but I had no idea how long the water repair would take. On the way home, I explained to Morgan what all this meant: no showers or baths, no toilet flushing, no drinking water, no dish washing, and no clothes washing.
Thirty minutes after arriving at home, one of the workers came to my front door. Through broken English I thought he was informing me my water was turned off. “Spoiler,” I said, sarcastically. “I already got that call.” But I had misunderstood him. The man was informing me that they were about to turn off my power as well.
Awesome.
My plan was to gracefully shut down my computers and turn off other electronics before the power was cut. Unfortunately for me, the power went off five seconds after I shut the front door. I hadn’t even made it to the hallway to tell Morgan what was about to happen.
92 degrees. No water, and now, no power.
While I ranted and raved to strangers on Twitter, Susan (halfway across the country in Washington D.C.) was on the phone with OG&E, who said no such cut had been reported to them. After a few more phone calls, magically, the crew working in my backyard reported the cut water line, and OG&E said they would reimburse us for the cost of the repair — which is all good news, but doesn’t feel like good news when you can’t flush a toilet and your house is beginning to warm up because your air conditioner doesn’t have any juice.
I had incorrectly assumed that our power would be off only long enough for the workers to splice together the connection or maybe even disconnect the old one and connect the new one, but I was wrong. We were without power for about two hours — not the end of the world, but it feels like forever when you don’t know when it’s coming back.
Through Susan’s conversations with OG&E, we learned that it wasn’t the water line to our house that had been cut (which is what I originally understood), but rather the water line from our house to our sprinkler system. If that line could be cut off, we were told, the water to our house could be turned back on.
If I knew how to do that. And if I had one of those long metal sticks for doing that, which I don’t.
The next several hours were spent on the phone, talking and texting with friends who know more about sprinkler systems than I. Between my friends Tim and Jeff, we were able to narrow down which valve “most likely” cut off water to the sprinkler system. Around 9 p.m., my neighbor Dave arrived home from church and emerged from his garage with a flashlight and a water key! Fifteen minutes later, water again flowed. There was much rejoicing (and flushing).
In the big scheme of things, none of this was a big deal. We’ll get the sprinkler pipe repaired and send OG&E the bill. As I look back on the ordeal, it wasn’t the cut line that upset me as much as the man’s attitude. I can’t imaging entering someone else’s home, breaking something, and then waiving off any responsibility. (For the record, the digging crew had to literally be standing on top of a blue “water line” flag where they were digging; I’d swear on that in court.) At the end of the day, we can’t always control what happens, but we can control how we react to it and how we handle it.
At the end of my driveway sits a 4-foot-by-8-foot hole roughly two feet deep with a broken water pipe down in the bottom of it. I don’t suspect my plumber will have a hard time finding it.
