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.
January 2, 2018.
That's probably a 2 1/2" pipe.
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!
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.