"Its like deja-vu all over again." Yogi Berra.

The road is closed and is being torn up again outside our house. When I asked why, it seems that the water main break was not fixed the last time they dug a hole. Unexpected hydro (electicity) lines were found. Hydro was not on-site, so the break was not fixed. This time, all appropriate organisations are here, we hope!

There's another hole in the road.

A song, popular in England in the 50s or 60s goes: "There's another hole in the road. Well,well, well, I'm blowed. Look, there's another one, same as the other one. There's another hole in the road." (My imperfect memory says it was sung by Lonny Donnegan.)

At 8 00 am the City began to dig yet another hole in the road in front of our house, almost on my across-the-road neighbour's lawn. This time it is to repair a leak in the water supply lines.


The digging machine is blocking my neighbour's driveway. She will not be too pleased.






The work is promised to be completed by 4 00 pm and the water supply will be restored by then. At 10 00 am the water is still on so Julian was able to have a shower on getting home from work. We do have the upstairs bathtub filled with cold water for when the water is cut off.








After this excavation, only one more set is scheduled. That set is to dig down to the foundations in front of our house so as to drill through that wall and then dig a sump pump pit inside the home to aid on flood relief control. This was supposed to have been done early in the fall but it never happened. Perhaps it will happen in the spring?

POST SCRIPT: The digging is on a section of my neighbour's lawn. I just saw the machine uproot and break the Roger's Cable supply to her house. She definately will not be pleased since this is the second time this has happened, and Rogers is not swift in replacing it.

The past revisited in Red Lake

This is a photo of our home in Red Lake in 1975. We purchased the land it was built on, almost one acre of rock and bush, from the school board. The contractor who built it agreed to provide the 200 foot driveway in return for my labour in constructing the home during my summer holidays. I was also to be responsible for providing the hook-up to the water and sewer lines.

Red Lake is solidly located within the Canadian Shield. Bedrock is either very close to the surface or at the surface. The cost of blasting a trench to a minimum of six feet in depth for a distance of 200 feet was astronomical. So I resorted to the tried and true Northern solution. Dig to bedrock and then encase the pipes in a wooden box filled with sawdust. bury this as deeply as you can. Add heat lines to the water pipe too.

For several years this was successful, especially if we had a "bleeder" line going too. A "bleeder" is where a toilet is allowed to overflow all winter so that the water line has continuous flowing and does not freeze. Then, one winter, despite all precautions, the line did freeze. Northern ingenuity came to the fore again. We connected a 200 foot hosepipe to our nearest neighbour's outside tap to our outside tap, and we had water. That hose was kept running until deep in the spring.

Our next solution was to install an "aquaflow" unit in our crawl space beneath the house. This unit had a 50 gallon tank into which water flowed. When it became full, a pump then started up and expelled the water directly back into the water line. Flow was maintained, and no water was lost to the town.

That was the end of any water problems until Adrian dropped a bunch of shower curtain hooks down the toilet causing a sewer back-up. But that's another story.

The saga continues!

Today, one day after the road was resurfaced and top soil added to my messed up front yard, another man from the City appeared at our door. This time from the water department. It was the same man who told us two or three weeks ago that the waterline into the house has a leak. He had now received a report from the pople that excavated and replaced the sewer lines that indeed there is a leak. Why it could not have been fixed while the line was uncovered last week is a mystery.

The leak is, apparently, on City property. More excavations seem to be likely on the street outside. I did tell the other City people about the purported leak before last week's excavation, and they did promise to speak across departments. But.....