Monday, March 9th - Day 1
Remember how I said that even at its worst, winter was usually just annoying? Mayra sent this picture from our driveway six days later:
Mayra: "Hmmm. Puddle over drain? Are the pipes frozen?"
Me: "Um, that's not good."
This drain leads to a catch basin, 8 feet deep, at the lowest point of our driveway. It has an outlet trap about four feet down that leads to the city pipes, and basically any water on our property (including, but not limited to, 110" of melting snow) runs down to this drain.
We had a plumber come out and confirm that, yep, the drain was a solid block of ice. They could charge us a thousand dollars to flush it with water, or we could wait for it to thaw. There was an obvious right answer, but screw that. Some unspoken decision was made to finally beat back winter ourselves.
The first move was Home Depot for a bag of salt. Because it probably wasn't that thick, right? The salt would melt a hole, water drains, done and done. After dumping half the bag that night, we woke up the next morning to... a bigger puddle. Poked the ice with a broom handle, but not much of a reaction. The salt was going to need another day or two to work it's magic, but the puddle was only getting bigger. So back to Home Depot for a pump (and a pry bar. You know, just in case.)
Day 2
Got a small 0.5 horsepower transfer pump that moved 20 gallons a minute. Nothing fancy, because I just needed to buy some time for the salt. Hooked up the garden hoses and started pumping up the driveway out to the working drain in the street. An hour (1200 gallons!?) later I was back down to the ice, a foot below the drain. More salt, more fruitless poking with broom handle.
The puddle obviously reformed, but this time when I poked at the ice, something gave. A few pieces of ice floated up, while the handle went down an extra foot or so. More poking, and now the handle was all the way through. But there wasn't a lot of wiggle room, and more disconcerting, where was the whooshing of water down the hole? I pried open the grate, snaked the hose down the hole I had made, ran the pump for another half hour, and got my first look at what we were up against.
Good news: A hole! Bad news, nothing really went down this hole. It just filled up. And stomping the surrounding ice was like kicking a jersey barrier. It wasn't very satisfying pulling the grate back over.
Day 3 - 11
And this was how it went. If it was a warm day we would come home to a lake and run the pump until you went to bed. Then wake up to a big puddle, and head outside to hook up the pump again. If you left the pump out, that just meant the temperature would drop and the hoses would freeze. Other days it was cold enough that the drain would stay empty for a day or two. One day the pump got clogged with debris, and I was on the verge of panic. Another night when it rained I just stood there with a head lamp, watching the pump battle the rainfall, winning by only the slightest of margins. Wish I had kept track of how many thousands of gallons of water we moved.
There were occasional signs of hope. Random stuff would sometimes be found floating the next morning. Tennis balls, a pingpong ball, nerf bullets. Floatsam from a long-since-buried summer. Something down there must be melting. One morning the puddle had frozen over, but the water had actually receded a few inches beneath. Hey, that's progress! But then we spotted the wiffle bat.
When we moved into the house, it took the kids a few weeks to figure out what did and did not fit through the grate. Then it took them a while to figure out that what went in didn't come back out. One of these experiments involved a wiffle bat. I had completely forgotten this, until one night I finally caught a glimpse of the outlet trap under the ice and murky water, and sure enough the wiffle bat was lodged in there. Of course it was. And it wouldn't budge. I always knew the outlet trap was frozen, but the bat was like a big yellow middle finger sticking out of it.
Day 12
It was a warm, sunny Saturday, and I decided to pry open the grate and, well, do something. The first thing we noticed after draining the water was that the ice was pulling away from the basin walls. You can't tell from the earlier picture, because the grate is only three feet square, but the basin that it leads to is 6-7' in diameter. So there was basically a 7' donut of ice, with a 3' hole in the middle, just hanging there. But seven days of dripping water had weakened one side. And after a half-hour of chipping at it with a spade, it started creaking. Ever try to move something really large and almost, well, unmoveable, and just when it is about to loosen its grip it makes a noise that makes you stop pushing and reevaluate whether you should be trying to move it in the first place? It sounded like that. After a little more work, the ring finally split and fell into the water below, and it was a bit like watching an iceberg launch. The first thing that became painfully obvious was that the "ice" that was on top, the stuff that looks like slushy snow but is really hard as a rock, was not the problem. The problem was the standing water beneath the snow. The water that was at the outlet level, well below the frost line every other winter, which had frozen so perfectly solid that it looked like obsidian. Two feet of it at least. So I guess it was cold this winter. But hey, having that ice floating in the water was better then... um.
And there was another small victory. Cam had just proposed a bunch of ideas for breaking up the ice, including dynamite (Me: "I think that would also break the concrete"), cannon balls (Me: "Fired out of a cannon? Or dropped?"), and a flamethrower (Me: "Actually not a bad idea, but mom would never let us.") Refusing to be left out of this conversation, Grant suggested we use magnets to pull out the ice. But then Cam focused on the bat. We couldn't really get a hold of it, as it was pointing down out of the trap under a foot of water and four feet below the drain. But he managed to catch it and bend it up with a rake, which in turn allowed me to push it down with a shovel, and it was like King Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone. Nobody cared that the outlet was still frozen solid. We had our trophy.
Thursday, March 26th - Day 17
I didn't even look at the forecast. I was simply fed up. First I drained the basin below the outlet trap. Then I stuck an 8' ladder all the way down into the muck and climbed in. Grant and Mayra's mom formed a bucket brigade to the kitchen, and I poured hot water over the trap. Then I got the biggest screwdriver I had and started blindly poking around. There was an elbow of ice, but now it was loose and rattling, and after a few more buckets it finally slid out. But that was too easy, and it was also as far as I could reach into the trap with the screwdriver. When I tried to snake some wire farther down the pipe, there was more resistance. I thought about pulling off the trap altogether, but the basin was filling back up and I decided to break for lunch. Before going in, melt-off had already filled it almost to the top of the drain again. Sigh.
Then it was over. I looked out the window after lunch to see how big the puddle had gotten, but it was gone. I ran outside, and the drain was empty. Some combination of the hot water bath, removing ice from the elbow, and static pressure had finally flushed it. But I didn't even get the satisfaction of watching it happen. We didn't win as much as winter had finally given up. And then the rain came. Pounding, heavy spring rain, all afternoon. More water than the poor pump could have possibly kept up with. And it all just drained away.
This is a ridiculous story, the morale of which is obviously "hire a plumber". As far as annoyances, this probably rates somewhere between "it gets dark too early" and "I need to shovel again". Our neighbors had their car crushed by snow and ice sliding off their roof. An avalanche in Cambridge buried five people. We didn't even have flooding in the house, just the driveway and garage. But the story wrote itself, which is good since I haven't written much else this winter. And I stood in the garage for a long time that afternoon, just listening to the rain gushing down the drain. Later that night I went for a run, warm puddles washing two months worth of salt from my shoes. It was still raining, but there was also fog. Hound of the Baskervilles fog, rising out of the snow. It felt like the soul of winter was finally slipping away into the night. Our last long training run was Saturday, and or course it was snowing. But whatever. Spring has been sprung.
