Friday, October 09, 2009

One pipe forward two hoses back?

Okay, now what the hell? I get up this morning and this is what I see looking down from my front porch:



In the upper right hand corner you can see that it originates in the temporary pipe, which is exposed in an unfilled section of the gutter.



And runs to the little boarded window that leads to the crawlspace of our building, where I had noticed earlier last week that it looked like someone had added a valve to. I didn't have a chance to talk to my downstairs neighbour about it.



And then looking up and down the block, it appears that every single house on our side of the street has these crazy hoses attached to them.



What the hell? What was the point of digging up the sidewalk and unearthing the main valves to each of our houses? Have they not actually attached anything down there? Were they dug up for the future when the proper aqueduct is in place? This setup strikes me as very sketchy. All of our water is going to be supplied by a bunch of garden hoses just laying out in the street for anyone to trip over, cut, inject LSD into?

This job started out quite strong, but it's starting to get that old Montreal air about it. I think a call to mr. Fillip Foti is in order.

4 comments:

Olivier said...

Look at the bright side of things: now you get to politely and steadfastly make your way up the project's chain of command!

Pie in the sky theory warning: maybe you guys have some of those lead or iron or whatever toxic material water intakes they were talking about a few months ago and now they are going to change them? I know there was this story about some of Montréal's old water main having to be replaced or something.

That or I was drunk...

Either way, I, for one, welcome the unforseen development! Might help that it's not *my* water supply that's now beholden to a garden hose tough...

OlmanFeelyus said...

There was a mild kerfluffle amongst the other condo owners that we should take this opportunity to replace our pipes if we need to, but then everybody got to busy. We'll probably re-visit it this weekend. That would be cool if the city helped out, but we shall see.

It does make the story more interesting, so let's hope for some drama since now the mailman has been delivering steadily, there's no controversy there.

Buzby said...

But have they shut down the old pipes and turned on the garden hoses yet? When they did ours they had big thick blu plastic pipes leading from the main pipe on the street to the house's intake.

OlmanFeelyus said...

Yes, it appears the garden hoses are indeed turned on. It was pretty ironic actually because the upstairs neighbours had a leak in one of their pipes, but the plumber couldn't get into the basement to turn off the water because the downstairs neighbour wasn't home. So there was a whole email exchange about how we should all have copies of each other's keys. Then when the plumber came the next day, they had installed the hoses and all he had to do was twist the knob that is sticking out of the wall in the front yard.

It also demonstrates our weakness if we were to be put under siege, as anyone from a semi-intelligent zombie on up could quite easily cut off our water supply and were screwed.