Cold weather freezing water pipes across the region

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Last Thursday Pat McMullan woke up to discover the waterline to her home was frozen. For four days she and her husband went without water until her neighbour allowed her to tap into their waterline. “I’m so glad it’s over. It was horrible. It wasn’t pleasant. The city did bring us two jugs of water and we got water from our neighbours. That’s how we had to flush the toilets, with water people brought to us.” The water was restored to Pats home this morning but that’s not the case for hundreds of other families that are still dealing with frozen lines. 720 homes have had frozen water lines this winter, an extraordinary amount considering last year there were 40.

February’s record cold temperatures have resulted in a record number of homes reporting frozen waterpipes. The situation is so bad in Hamilton that the mayor held a news conference to address the issue.”This has been unusual. We’ve also had an unusual amount of watermain breaks” says Mayor Fred Eisenberger

To fix the problem crews first have to find where the pipe is frozen. Dan McKinnon is the Director of Water and Wastewater Operations “typically that involves taking off the water meter and starting to feed in a small diameter hose in with hot water in it. Sometimes we see they are not able to do that because the further you push the line out the more difficult it gets to do it…so quite often we see they get out to road allowance and can’t get any further. In those cases we have to dig outside and expose the water line, heat it up with hot water to see if we can get the water line going.”

The City has set up a new e-mail address specifically designed to address these issues. The email address is hwemergency@hamilton.ca