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>> That about says it all...

Yup.
I don't know how long you've been around here, but I think it was early in 1989 that we had the "arctic express" here.
It is the only time I remember the temperature dipping below zero here in the valley.

It all started with a snowfall, maybe just a couple inches, it started to melt, then the weather cleared up and it froze real hard, and it stayed that way for a couple of weeks. Where I worked, we had guys working in a warehouse that was partially finished, it had insulation but no heat, and in the mid day sun it was actually colder inside than outside, those guys were miserable.

All the highways stayed icy for days, no thawing at all, and the route to the coast from here was especially treacherous.

One day late in the event, when the high temperatures were getting up into the 20s, a small group of us headed to Florence because it was a bit warmer there, and we wanted to see snow on the beach. We hadn't seen snow on the beach since we had the big snow when I lived there in 1969.

All went well there, do driving mishaps (really, still very little traffic), but unbeknown to me, things were going bad at home. A came home to discover my folks had come to visit, and my mom seemed to be in a bit of a panic.

The panic was because a pipe running through one of the outside walls had burst, and the water spray had pierced the drywall and was spraying full blast right into the middle of the front room. The place was flooded, the whole place, water everywhere, water running out the front door.

I tried to shut off the water at the meter, but I had two problems with that. First, the meter was buried under a couple of inches of solid ice, and second, I wasn't altogether sure where the meter was. So I went back to the house and took an axe to the outside wall and busted out a section of siding, then grabbed the busted copper pipe and bent it around so it was spraying outside instead of inside, then went back to search for the meter. After some ice chipping I found a meter and shut it off, but it was the neighbor's. Went back and found the one next to it and shut it off and it was mine. Went back and pinched off the busted pipe so I could turn the water back on, then grabbed the yellow pages looking for someone to come out and help fix the huge mess.

Took a while, but I found a rug cleaning outfit that had a high powered extractor and the guy came out right away and rigged things up and sucked about a ton of water out of the carpeting, while a few of us spent the night with him jockeying around the furniture. Next day I found a contractor who came out and fixed the pipe, replaced the soaked insulation, and put new drywall & texture inside and new siding outside, all while I was at work for the day. Next day I came home from work and all had been painted to match and I couldn't tell anything had happened.

Never saw a bill for any of it. My friend Jim Walsh (since retired, and deservedly comfortable and healthy) was a good insurance agent. Helped me find those people to get all of that done - I know I could never expect that kind of service from the outfit that bought him out when he retired, they cater more to the corporate world these days, and my measly few hundred a year means nothing to them.