The Flood

Our garage flooded this evening. D:

Mr. Cap and I were leaving the house a little after 6pm to stop by the store and pick up a few organizers, and I was hurrying out the door without really looking around me.

"Hey wait," Mr. Cap said as he stood in the hallway. "Do we have a leak?"

I looked behind me and noticed that there was a damp spot on the carpet right next to the entrance of our mechanical room.

Why yes--it did appear we had a leak.

When we opened the door, we found the floor was wet. Not flooded, but it looked like something had spilled all over the room. Luckily all we had stored in there were some of the empty boxes left from unpacking, and a couple other items that weren't easily damaged.

We looked around the room to see if we could locate a burst pipe, but had no luck. So I said "Well, let's still get to the and we can figure out what to do on the way there. I'll call my dad."

When I stepped outside, I noticed that there was a stream of water leaking out from under our garage door. When I looked at the other condos in our building...I noticed that their garages were leaking, too.

Mr. Cap opened the side door to the garage, and let me know that there was currently about 4 inches of water sitting in there. He opened the main door and a small flood poured down our driveway.

At this point, I decided it would be neighborly to stop by next door and let them know what was going on. I met the very nice lady that lived next door, and together we got to experience the horror of her opening her garage door and finding about a foot of water inside. She was panicked because they'd been using their garage for storage instead of parking, so her family had a lot of stuff that was possibly damaged. I then left a slightly hysterical message on the answering machine of the condo manager, letting him know that for some reason the garages of our building were floods (as where the mechanical rooms in all our condos). I crossed my fingers that he's get the message on a Saturday night,

The couple that lived in the third unit in our building weren't home, but the lady next door had their number so she called them to let them know what was going on. At about this point I got a call back from my father, and I headed over to his house (about a 15 minute drive) to pick up some laundry I'd left there, and to explain the situation to him. Mr. Cap stayed behind with the neighbor/s in case anyone showed up to help.

While I was gone, the fire department showed up and discovered that the sprinkler system's pipes had frozen (hurrah!). They turned that off, and the water flowing into our condos finally came to a stop. At this point we only had the water damage to worry about.

The condo manager showed up around 7:30/8:00 pm and left us a large fan to start blowing on our hallway. this was actually sufficient for the water Mr. Cap and I had received, however it turned out that the other two occupied units in our building had ended up with a lot more water than we had. At least a foot of water in their garages, and fully soaked mechanical rooms.

Mr. Cap and I came out lucky, but I really hope our neighbors do alright. It also started snowing during this whole debacle. Pretty, but a constant reminder that the temperatures are getting really cold here this year.