About three weeks ago, My boss and I were walking with our plumber, when we got to talking about turning the water on the building. We had to replace the existing main running into the building with a much larger one, and so the hotel had basically been without water for a year.
"I guarantee you," our plumber said. "When we turn the water on, there'll be no leaks."
There's a saying in construction that if you've ever met a plumber who told you he's never had a leak, he's a liar. We're not very witty with our sayings.
We decided to play it safe and only turned on three risers (there's over forty in the building). So, of course, I spent my entire day running around with a walkie-talkie. "Water here, water there. Water coming out of that wall. I don't even know how there's water there."
All told, we found seven leaks in those three stacks, which I guess is a 233% failure rate. I wish I could say that's unbelievable, but apparently in construction, everyone's okay with plumbers not being able to their job (the picture in the blog title is of me vacuuming up water from a flood on a previous project).
After several hours, we'd had enough and turned the water off. I'm not sure what the plan is from here on out. It's either going to require fixing a great number of holey pipes or hotel guest will just be showering with hope.
Of course, not all these were our plumber's fault. The worst one, well, we cut open the wall to find it, and we found a PVC pipe sawed in half. Someone working there was cutting something next to it, slipped, and chopped the pipe in two. Apparently they thought this would not be a problem and closed up the wall.
No, nothing wrong with gallons of water spewing out inside a wall on the fourth floor while six people are standing at a faucet on the tenth wondering why there's no water coming out.
Just an average Friday.
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