TIFU by drilling a hole in the water main

Submitted by Sahara-Phoenix t3_11a5vz7 in tifu

It was four in the morning. I kissed my partner good bye and he trudged through the thin layer of overnight snow to his truck for work. I mulled over what chore to tackle first. We had just gotten some new shelves for the garage, so I got down to some organizing. I came across a can crusher I'd purchased months ago. It was supposed to go on the wall above the recycling in the laundry room, so we could just crush the cans and drop them in the bin. Why not put it up?

In the laundry room, just off the garage, I used a studfinder and marked the spot with a pencil. I tried to put in a screw, but was meeting resistance. Figuring it was a knot, or just some particularly stubborn wood, I put a countersink bit into my drill. I pressed the drill through the drywall and gave it a little oomph. Water spurted from one side of our laundry room to the other, furiously hitting the opposite wall and splattering to the floor. It was not a stud.

I called my partner. He works in construction and knows how to fix my mishaps. While dialing the phone I looked around for those mythical turn off valves I'd heard about. I found one at the top of the water heater and turned it all the way right. Nothing happened. I stood collecting water in a bucket while my partner raced back home. With the door to the garage propped open, bucket after bucket was dumped down the driveway. The adrenaline wore off and I tried to keep my fingers, and the rest of me, from freezing.

He arrived and found the water main shut off at the street. Water ceased flying out of the wall. I apologized profusely for pulling him away from work, damaging our home, and being an idiot in general. Today, instead of relaxing on my day off, I get to clean up my mess. I have used all of our towels. The washer and dryer are disconnected while we fix the floor. We had been planning to renovate, starting with our bedroom. It looks like we'll be starting sooner than expected and in the laundry room instead.

TL;DR: While trying to mount something on the wall, I drilled into the water main and had to collect the water in a bucket, dumping frequently, until my partner could race home from work and shut it off at the street.

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Comments

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ThadisJones t1_j9rt8jp wrote

Look on the bright side, at least you didn't drill into:

  • A hot water line
  • A steam heating line
  • A live electrical conduit
  • The pipe that goes from your bathroom to the sewer
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EllieBelly_24 t1_j9secsh wrote

When it hit -25 in nova scotia the other week, the hot water pipe in my partner's apartment froze and burst when it thawed. It ended up draining all the hot water as the landlord didn't know how to turn off the water ><

As a bonus, the breaker box was in the same little dugout in the wall as the water heater, and the pipe burst perfectly to spray directly onto it.

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ThadisJones t1_j9tdnso wrote

In 2015 my city had a prolonged bout of extreme cold and snow, and a pipe burst in the building my company leases. The leak was directly above the main transformer for the building, which shorted and exploded, causing a fire. I got The Mother Of All Texts at 5am from my lab monitoring systems screaming that every fucking thing had switched to UPS power or was offline.

I raced into work in a blizzard and started our shutdown/tie-in protocol. The building owners ended up renting a truck-mounted generator for a week and parking it in the loading dock to provide emergency heating, emergency lights, and emergency power for critical equipment.

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Big_Simba t1_j9q6bpb wrote

There should also be a water shutoff where the service line enters the house - should be a little easier to get to than shutting it off at the curb. Anyone who lives in a house should learn where this is and how to shut off the water because it sucks to try and figure out while water is spewing into your home

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Reddit-username_here t1_j9re65v wrote

>There should also be a water shutoff where the service line enters the house

This is highly dependent on who built the house. I did construction for about 10 years in the Southeast, mostly building custom tile showers. Maybe 1 out of every 10 houses had a master shut-off other than at the meter.

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Wired9008 t1_j9rz6s7 wrote

Unfortunately shit happenes, don't be afraid to take on projects like this. You tried and it didn't work out no big deal.

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St3phiroth t1_j9spg8l wrote

In the future, (and I hope this never happens to you again,) you can go ahead and put the screw into the hole in the pipe that you accidentally drilled and it will plug most of the flow of water and give you time to get to the shutoff with much less water damage.

I imagine you will always drill carefully and stop at the drywall and use a probe to check what's inside from now on though. Something like this sticks with you.

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