Big chill bursts pipes and heats up business for plumbers

It is a chilling tale of winter, one that in ghost-story fashion begins with a sign that all is not right. Maybe there's a damp spot spreading ominously across a wall, or faint sounds that grow louder and more insistent.

"I heard water dripping," Liz Simon-Higgs of Baltimore said, "but mostly what I heard was my water meter spinning."

Similarly, Kacey Gaige heard the tell-tale sound of water on the move in her Severna Park home, "but I wasn't running the laundry." As she headed into her garage to pick her kids up at school Thursday, the source of the mystery sound was revealed.

"Oh, an ice skating rink," she said of the water that had spewed from a broken pipe onto the garage floor, freezing in the unheated space.

Throughout the area, the record-breaking cold has caused water pipes to freeze and burst, unleashing rivers of water that panicked homeowners rush to stop.

"I was just turning valves," Gaige told Stephen Tant Jr., a plumber who had arrived Friday afternoon to fix her pipes.

Tant, who works for Len the Plumber company, began sorting through a complicated set of pipes, spigots and knobs running along the wall of the unheated garage. Water had apparently frozen in one pipe, causing it to separate at the point where it had been soldered to another length of pipe.

Like other plumbers in the area, Tant, 28, has spent much of this frigid spell heading from one winter-worn pipe to another.

"We've never had unbearable cold like this," he said. "We were just catching up from the last cold spurt, and now we're back into it again."

Tant had just left a rowhouse in Southwest Baltimore where an outdoor spigot connected to a garden hose froze and cracked, sending water cascading down outdoor steps and a walkway to the street, where it froze into a thick sheet of ice along the curb.

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Big chill bursts pipes and heats up business for plumbers