Posted on 04/09/2018 10:16:14 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
OKLAHOMA CITY - Thousands of gallons of water went pouring into the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority office Sunday.
"A hundred thousand gallons of water had already spilled in the building," said Jack Damrill, communications director for the OTA.
Damrill said cold temperatures caused the fire sprinkler system to burst.
"It's just amazing. Water poured out of there in a short amount of time," Damrill said.
The water didn't just stop on the main floor; it kept flowing through cracks and the ceiling, spilling through offices on the first floor.
"We've had to relocate a couple of people to some different offices," Damrill said.
Damrill said, because it was clean water flooding the office space, the agency should be able to save the carpet; as for the ceiling, not so much.
"Just one of those inconveniences from cold weather. You don't expect for it to happen to you but, unfortunately, it did for us," Damrill said.
Collin Frayser, owner of Cherokee Plumbing, said Turnpike Authority's office isn't the only one dealing with frozen pipes. The company has been flooded with calls.
"We had a few calls over the weekend, but today we had several calls," Frayser said. "Our customers who have copper pipes are more likely to have a burst pipe than our customers who have a plastic PEX of pipe."
Frayser said, when it gets below freezing, homeowners should always have their heat on, let their faucets drip and detach the water hose from the outdoor spigot.
I’m not buying that. It got down to 24F on Saturday. Cold but certainly not enough to crack pipes, in my experience.
The high was in the high 40’s with the mean temp at 35.
These are indoor pipes which means that ambient indoor temperature was somewhat warmed by the building itself.
A 3/4” pipe can flow about 7 gallons per minute. Assuming the pipe broke early Saturday morning and was discovered Monday morning, at most 20,000 gallons would have flowed from one broken pipe. The odds of multiple pipes cracking in such relatively mild temperatures are exceedingly low.
Plus, 7gpm is for a fully open pipe. A cracked pipe doesn’t usually fully break, instead it splits, thus reducing flow.
If they lost hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, it was something far more than a simple broken pipe.
Striking teachers perhaps?
I suppose I should have put the article’s data somewhere besides the date field when posting. This is from January 2.
This is weird, I might be taking a cross country road trip next week and just checked online to see if Oklahoma accepts EZ Pass (it does not), and I see this article about the Oklahoma Turnpike.
January 2, 2018.
At least it wasn’t the fire sprinkler authority offices!
.
What global warming?
This stuff happens all the time.
I actually had to do a pipe profile survey in the attic of the Sierra Lodge in Mammoth Lakes for a court exhibit over this kind of damage.
If I remember corectly the damage was about $5 million at the hotel.
That's probably a 2 1/2" pipe.
Christmas break. That makes a little more sense.
In my neck of the woods, they require flow sensor alarms.
Should alert maintenance, at a minimum.
They usually trigger <10 GPM.
? The leak started at 6 PM Fri? was discovered 6 AM Monday??
48 hrs? ~ 2,000+ Gal/Hr? Running out the front door!
The lights are on but no one is home!
Another reason NOT to pay tax refunds on state taxes!
One of the companies offices had radiator fluid pour into their office from some repair shop above them. I have photos of green fluid on the floor, desks etc.
Fire mains are usually considerably larger, and often have very powerful pumps driving the water, literally pulling it faster than the main would normally supply.
I had a 3” fire line break a few years ago, and it nearly filled a 50’ deep 100’ square foundation pit for an 8 story building in 9 hours.
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