The last thing you want to happen when you turn on a water faucet is nothing. That’s the response I got early Thursday morning when I went in our bathroom and tried to fill a glass with water. I knew instantly (it doesn’t take a genius to figure these things out) that a water line or lines had frozen.

It had been many years since that had happened and, being many years older, I truly did not want it to happen now. But here it was, smacking me square in the face.

A trip downstairs to turn on other faucets quickly confirmed that no water was coming to the house. That was potentially, believe it or not, good news because with any luck, the main pumphouse feed pipe — and only that pipe — had frozen. 

Sure enough, the light I keep burning in the pumphouse during bitter cold weather had burned out. I quickly found a small heater that we had used in a little greenhouse and put it in the pumphouse. It didn’t seem to be putting out a lot of heat, so I headed to town to get a replacement heat lamp.

By the time I was driving home, Anne called to say water was running. And it was — upstairs and down. Whew!

It’s not like we don’t take precautions. A guest bedroom is slightly more exposed than other parts of the old farmhouse, and that’s where we always leave a faucet dripping when the temperature is due to go into low teens or single digits, as it did early Thursday. And the pumphouse light is also turned on when temperatures begin going seriously below freezing.

But it’s a constant policing job, and I hadn’t checked on the pumphouse light for a couple of days. A big mistake.

This relatively minor incident reminded me of a far more serious one on Christmas Eve, 1983 — just over 41 years ago. 

That day began with very tolerable temperatures in the 50s, but a massive cold front was bearing down on the region, and it struck mid-afternoon. By that late evening, temperatures had dropped to near zero, and a north wind drove it into every nook and cranny with gusts to well over 30 mph.

The sudden temperature drop was so severe that old electrical lines in Community Electric’s territory shrunk and, in some cases, simply snapped. In others, tree limbs fell across the lines and broke them. Nearly a thousand rural homes in Isle of Wight, Southampton and eastern Surry lost power in an era when home generators didn’t exist.

We spent that night in our den on a fold-out sofa, bundled in quilts with the children and drawing meager heat from a tiny kerosene room heater. (The house was so drafty that carbon monoxide didn’t stand a chance of accumulating.)

The hot water furnace circulators froze, so that when power was restored close to 10 hours later, there still was no heat unless you stood next to the furnace.

God bless the late Eddy Rowland, who was employed back then at Smithfield Hardware on Main Street. He went to the store early Christmas morning and sold every kerosene heater in the place, the last two to me.

They got the house temperature well above freezing that day, and early on Christmas evening, we heard water running. Hallelujah. Or not.

An upstairs cast iron radiator had cracked the previous night, and the running water was coming through the hall ceiling.

God bless Eddy again. He went back to the store and sold me an assortment of copper pipe and fittings, with which I spent hours replacing the radiator with a piece of straight copper pipe. 

By some time before sunrise on Dec. 26, we had heat restored. Which was far better than some people fared. The late Jack and Mildred Ramsey lost the entire copper heat circulation system under their house. I believe they had to move out while plumbers rebuilt it.

Throughout the two counties, carburetors froze on cars and trucks, which had to be pulled into warm spaces to thaw before they would start.

And that spring, we learned that the quick freeze had split open the trunks of well over a thousand mature crepe myrtle trees in Isle of Wight and Surry. It took years for them to recover.

Last week was cold, and frozen pipes are always a nuisance, but looking back, it could certainly have been a lot worse — and on occasion, has been.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.