Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, Guerneville, CA.
I didn’t get a shower last night, after three days of camping out.
A big storm came in last night, about eight inches over night. There was water everywhere, except in our water tank sometime near midnight. I went to get a drink of water and all I got was air. Nothing to do about it until I got up in the morning, so went to bed.
So, this morning, the first thing I did was go out and see what had to be done to get some water going again. We have five houses on our spring water system, so it was important to get it going again.
Went across the road to my Aunt’s house to see if the temp repair I did last summer had let loose, as I never got back to finish that job up, as I was too busy playing around this fall.
Yes, the hole was full of water so went back and got my car and drove up in the forest to shut the tank valve off, so I could begin to drain the mud hole to fix the pipe.
When I got back to the hole, my brother Tom was there with his chain saw.
Seems it wasn’t my fault it broke. It wasn’t a lac of fixing it, it just so happened a some willow trees fell on the pipe in the heaviest part of the storm and pushed the pipe down in the raging creek, which pulled the pipe down and pulled it out of the temp fix I did last summer.
Actually, it was a good thing I hadn’t got back to that job, as this would of pulled it all apart anyway. As it was, it just pulled out a rubber connector I temporarily put in there and that was good. If it was glued, it would of really ripped even more pipe out.
I put my brother cutting up the trees and started draining the hole. Turned out we had to dig about twenty feet of pipe up to get it back, which I would have had to do to finish the fix anyway, so all wasn’t so bad, except we had to do it in the mud.
Below, my brother Tom, just finished cutting all the trees off the pipe in the creek. The creek was much higher last night when this happened. We used a chain and come along to pull the pipe back up, as it has a few big crinkles in it, but we hoped it wasn’t broken inside the frost insulated pipe you can see. The other one is inside this one.
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You can see where the pipe pulled away below. The little piece in the rear is supposed to be connected to the one coming in from the left. We had to dig about twenty feet of the rear one up to get it back.
You can see the ditch we had to dig to get this hooked back up, in the mud in the picture below.
We went back up to the main tank and turned the water back on and came back to see if our repair held and it did. The blocks of wood are there to keep the rubber clamp from popping off from the pipe pressure.
My brother and I did all this in about two hours in the pouring rain.So, now we have a double temporary repair, which I hope will keep until summer when I can do a good job putting it all back together, without all the mud. I will have to frost proof it somehow for he rest of the winter.
I was really damp from all the sweating from digging and cold, so went home and got a real hot shower since we now had water and sorta crashed for a couple hours from all that digging.
Santa Rosa looking for parts for my van air intake.
At about three, went to the first parts store and had no luck finding what I needed, so had to cross town and checked another store that had some of it, enough to keep moving on with the project. It was raining fairly hard, so wasn’t much fun driving around with all the crazy people going too fast for the weather.When I got home, I was mostly pooped out and couldn’t get off the couch for a couple of hours.
Even though, not planned, it was a fairly productive day. .Tomorrow, I will try to go yakking down at Jenner, even though the river is up a bit and real muddy. Need to do that, because more rain is coming for Sunday, so this is my only chance to stay dry and yak, until all the rain is gone for this session. And enough for anyway, eh.
Had a great day, although a bit tiring.