Water the way of life!

Sometime Friday night into early Saturday morning, a copper water line serving the small toilet room next to the nursery froze and cracked allowing water to

lead onto the ceiling of that room.

Both the Donut Hole men and No Basement church ladies canceled their Saturday morning studies due to the cold. Fortunately, an outside group was using the fellowship hall for a training class and discovered the leak when they arrived at the building 6:30 am Saturday. We were notified, got the water shut off to the new section of the building and began drying out the floors. Carpets affected by water were in the new fellowship hall, both hallways in classroom wing, nursery, and all classrooms except for classroom 5 at the end of the hallway.

We vacuumed up water as possible with wet-dry vacs, Brian Rebman Plumbing came in to repair the leak and Midwest Restoration was called to dry out the building. This is on-going and they are confident they can salvage what was wet.

We did learn a couple of important lessons:

There was a breech in the building envelope above the ceiling in the nursery toilet room which allowed cold air from the attic into the area above the suspended ceiling. This is what, in this extended cold snap, froze the pipe. This breech has been corrected.

4. The main water shut off valve for the classroom wing/kitchen/fellowship hall is in a small mechanical room connected to the music director's office off the narthex. This valve controls water only to the new addition (not the office wing) but is behind a door that is normally locked (music office). This may be a problem in future events such as this.

5. The water supply for the office wing is in the mechanical room off the hallway past Tina's office. This means if we shut water off to either the office wing or the classroom wing we would have water available to service the toilet rooms of the opposite area.

6. We are getting a quote from Brian on installing electric shutoff valves on the water services that detect any unusual flow of water and it will then shut off water to that service.

It may be a week or so before things are completely back to "normal" but things are looking good for full recovery.