Winter makes a rude entrance

Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, January 25, 2013 01:00 am

Pretty much everything I hate about winter happened in a 24-hour span earlier this week.

The battery in my vehicle died, necessitating a jump and subsequent replacement. Replacement required a 65-mile drive to have the new battery installed, and on the way home, I encountered snow falling heavily for the first 45 miles.

To put it mildly, I am not a fan of snow. Nor am I a fan of people who suffer paralysis behind the wheel when driving in snow, slowing to a crawl and helping themselves to the middle of the road, nor am I particularly fond of road-clearing apparatus that spews boulder-size chunks of sand at my vehicle as I pass.

The morning after it snowed, I woke up to find my water pipe frozen.  The slightest trickle of water from the faucet, followed by lots of nothing, told me the only water in the house was just the water in the lines. It was frozen at the source, which is under my flood panel-less house, thanks to Sandy having swept away all the breakaway panels that enclose my crawl space.

With the temperature below freezing, the wind whipping and three sides of my home, located at the terminus of a dead-end street, exposed to the elements , the water pipe – which is 6.5 feet tall from the time it leaves the ground until it enters my house -- had frozen in six hours.

I dug an extension cord out of a closet and went out onto the dining room deck, intending to plug in the cord and then snake it under the house, where I planned to set up a small space heater to blow on the frozen pipe. Conventional wisdom says a hand-held blow dryer is best in these circumstances, but no one in my house is vain enough to own a blow dryer.

I plugged in the extension cord. The outlet immediately began to spark wildly, and flames began to shoot out the end of the extension cord. I yanked the cord out of the outlet, examined the scorched end, and tossed it over the deck railing into the snow.

Back into the house I went for another extension cord, and then out the front door to another outlet. This attempt went well, meaning nothing sparked or caught on fire, so I snaked the cord under the house, where I set up a plastic step stool with the space heater on it directly in front of the frozen pipe.

With the heater set on high, it took about 15 minutes before water started dripping and then flowing through all the sink and tub faucets I had opened in the house.

Having learned my lesson, I left water trickling from an upstairs bathroom faucet when I went to bed that night. But my husband, who had missed the whole ordeal since he was slumming with college buddies at a cabin in the Poconos, came home from his three-day trip and turned off the water around 4 a.m. By 6:30, when I arose, the water pipe beneath the house had frozen again.

This time, I skipped the part where I attempted to burn down the house with a faulty extension cord and went straight to thawing the ice in the pipe.

We’ve weathered 18 winters in our house, and the number of times the water pipe has frozen could be counted on the toes of a three-toed sloth. But that was before Sandy, when the house had breakaway panels that provided protection from the wind. Without that protection, the pipe – which is wrapped in foam and duct tape – is too vulnerable to the cold.

Like many homeowners, I have been ignored by my flood insurance carrier. The adjuster visited in November, surveyed the damage to the property, said he had to be conservative about what he submitted or he would be subject to paying any costs that were suspicious, and disappeared back to Texas.

The Ocean City agency that arranged my flood insurance policy has been completely uninvolved in furthering claims, sending out one email that warned policy holders that claims often take 45 to 60 days to settle, but with Sandy being such a massive storm, to expect it to take longer.

With so many people having suffered so much more damage than I did, I felt it was selfish to press my issue sooner. But two straight mornings of thawing water pipes in my crawl space in the dark before dawn has convinced me that I need to insist on some degree of responsiveness from my insurers.

If I don’t, I’m going to be facing astronomical water bills this winter, which will make no one but the utility company happy.