You Can't Make Up Stuff Like This....

I'm in San Luis Obispo right now, visiting my mom. This morning, I'm online, working on Atlas Quest, and I hear her call out for me from the front. She sounded rather urgent, so I dropped the keyboard and went rushing outside into the front yard. There was a geyser near the side of the house!

As soon as I saw it, I knew what had happened. Last night, when I came into the house, I noticed a backhoe in the yard, and I asked my mom about that. "What the heck are you doing with a tracker?" She had some ideas for yard work, and I asked, "How do you know you won't hit a water main or something?" And she assured me that she's done this before.

Yeah, okay. So when I saw the geyser of water shooting up into the air--kind of at an angle into the garage door--with a backhoe sitting at the point of origin, I knew what had happened. She hit a water main.

My mom had already pulled up the cover for the water shutoff for the house and was trying frantically to shut the water off. The wrenches we had weren't really ideal for the job, but in cases of emergency, you make do. We took turns trying to get it off, but it just wasn't working. I wasn't even really convinced that the part my mom was trying to turn would shut off the water. There were several nuts and bolts down there, none of which have been moved for years so far as I could tell, and none of them were conviniently labeled.

My mom tried calling a friend of the family--Terry, who works with CalTrans and knows a little about this sort of thing. Except Terry was at church. Terry would later tell us that she had forgotten to shut off her phone and embarrassingly turned it off during the service, not realizing the severity of the situation here.

That wasn't going to stop my mom. No, she left me to continue trying to work to turn off the water while my mom started up the car and rushed off to church.

I decided to do a couple of quick Google searches, trying to find a diagram of one of these darned water thingys online and find out exactly which piece needed to be turned. I found something that somewhat resembled what we had, and it suggested turning a different piece than we had been working on.

I went to the garage to find a tool that would better fit the knob that needed turning. The wrenches we had been using were so large, it was hard to move them in the confined area. The smaller wrenches, though, didn't seem to have enough leverage to get them to move. It was very frustrating.

While I was doing this, of course, my mom rushed to the church. It's pretty close to the house and only took a couple of minutes to get to, and my mom goes barging in looking for Terry, not exactly dressed in her Sunday bests. Terry's sitting near the front of the church, and my mom gets her attention. "Follow me. Now!" Nobody else knows what's going on, but clearly there's an emergency happening, and even the other members of the congregation were pushing Terry out to my mom. Terry left all her stuff there on the pew.

Outside, she stuffs Terry into the car and hitails it back to the house, explaning about the broken water main. I'm still meddling trying to get the water turned off, and Terry confirms at this point that I'm messing with the knob that I should be messing with, but we still have trouble getting it turned off. We aren't even sure which is the correct way to turn it. But a couple of minutes later, we finally get the water off and can take time to admire the damage.

The pipe was remarkably small, I thought, given how much water was gushing out of it. Looked all of about half an inch. Must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure to make a geyser like that! It wasn't even six inches underground--I always thought they were buried deeper than that, but what do I know?

At this point, there's no running water for the house, but the immediate crisis was certainly over so my mom drove Terry back to church to finish the service and retrieve her possessions. Turns out, things really started hopping there at the church when Terry left.

It seems a couple of people who knew Terry assumed there was an emergency. Perhaps a family emergency. Maybe even her ailing dad took a turn for the worse. They tried calling Terry, to find out what was the problem, but she had turned her phone off when my mom first tried to call so there would be no more embarrassing interruptions during the service. So they assumed the worst.

So her friends told the paster about this, and they all started to pray for her and her dad, having no idea that the 'emergency' wasn't really the kind that needed prayers, but hey, we'll take what we can get!

When Terry returned to the church and found out what all had happened in her absense, she was kind of embarrassed over the matter, but how can you NOT laugh after all that? After the services were over and Terry explained that nobody was dead or near death, I guess a couple of the congregation were upset over the incident, and she came back to the house to help with figuring out how to fix the broken water line.

So that's what's been happening here in the normally sleepy town of San Luis Obispo. Broke a water main, crashed a church, and got a whole bunch of people praying for someone that didn't really need it. Good times!

As of now, it doesn't look like I'll be taking a shower today. Maybe not tomorrow either?