The Explosion in the Basement
Newsletter 2026-01-29
This homeowner horror story began, as most do, with the sound of water.
My first assumption was that the kitchen sink was running. That thought was actually comforting. Earlier, I had discovered that the pipes to the kitchen sink had frozen. I had left the tap open and set to cold. After about ten minutes, the faucet sprang to life, releasing a cascade of frigid water. I moved the tap to hot. The water stopped, but I left the tap open in the hopes the warm water lines would thaw as well. Now, I heard running water again. But when I looked at the kitchen, the sink was bone dry. I looked in the other direction toward the first floor bathroom. That faucet wasn’t running, either. My heart sank. I turned my attention to the closed door right in front of me that led to the basement. I turned the knob and pulled.
Thick curls of smoke wafted up the stairs. No, not smoke; steam. Somewhere below, superheated water was blasting into the room like it was coming out of a fire hose. I couldn’t see the source through the thick haze. It looked like I had opened the doorway to hell. And to think, when I had woken up a few hours earlier, I had expected this to be a good day.
My hopes hadn’t been completely unfounded. Saturday night and all day Sunday, we had been buffeted by a snowstorm. By Sunday night, we had nine inches of snow on the ground with frigid temperatures that were only expected to get colder. That’s when the text alerts started rolling in. The kids would have e-learning Monday. Lola’s lab would be closed. I would have remote work. None of us would be leaving the house. We could wake up later than usual and wear comfy clothes all day. We looked forward to the most relaxing weekday in months. Mother nature had set us up for a brutal fall.
Monday, I slept in until 5:45 a.m.. It doesn’t get more leisurely than that. I started my day like most people: by tempting my pigs outside with pellets to make sure they went to the bathroom in our frozen backyard. Then I headed into the basement to work out. Having my own exercise equipment has saved me money and time compared to the gym membership I maintained for years. The downside is that it’s always cold. There are no vents that lead to the basement, despite the furnace being a few feet away from my weight bench. All of the heat is directed up. Anyone dumb enough to hang out in the basement is our lowest priority. That morning was especially chilly down below, but I expected that with the coldest temperatures of the year outside. I didn’t realize until after I worked out that we were letting the outside in.
The door leading from the basement to the exterior stairwell had been left open by a few inches all night. The kids had used that door the evening before when going in and out to get sleds and other snow supplies. When I discovered the open door (too late to make my workout any warmer), I thought that they must not have noticed that it popped open when they tried to close it. I didn’t learn until later that morning that my ten-year-old, Waffle, knew right away that she couldn’t get the door closed. Rather than asking for help, she simply left it open all night. I’ll let the reader ascribe their own motives as to why she did that. For my part, I can only assume malicious intent.
I went upstairs to my attic bedroom and took a shower. The hot and cold water were both working normally. I didn’t discover the kitchen sink lines were frozen until after I was back downstairs and getting ready to log into work. That’s when I left the tap open until the cold water ran and then switched it to hot. I figured that, eventually, the hot water would melt the ice and work its way out. It did work its way out, but not how I wanted at all.
Flash forward to right before 8 a.m., when I stood with the door to the basement open and steam wafting up. I ventured down into our surprise subterranean sauna. On the wall, a few inches from the door that had been open all night, water was erupting from the pipes, spraying everything with liquid a few degrees cooler than lava. I couldn’t tell the exact source. The water looked like it was coming from everywhere. I pushed through the first room of our quarter basement and into the second room where my workout equipment is located. I shoved aside some stuff on a shelf and reached back to shut off the main water line to the house. The scalding water immediately slowed. After a minute, it stopped completely. Lola came down to take a look. She sent me upstairs to grab a flashlight. The first step in any emergency situation is to get me out of the way.
By the time I got back into the basement, Lola had found the source of the problem. A thin copper pipe by the exterior door had split open. When the hot water had hit the ice in that particular line, the path of least resistance had been to blast through the metal walls of the pipe rather than simply melting the frozen blockage. That’s not how I would have done things, but I’m not water. It makes its own choices. As the steam cleared, Lola and I traced the path of the pipes, trying to figure out what we could isolate to keep water going into the house. The news wasn’t good.
All of the hot water in the house ran through the same set of lines. If we shut off the cold water going into and out of our tankless water heater, we could still get cold water elsewhere. But all hot water would be shut off from the bathrooms in addition to the kitchen. When we had our plumbing updated many years ago, we had apparently failed to notice that fatal design flaw. We were now officially in a crisis.
Luckily, the most important people in the house—by which I mean the largest and the stinkiest—had already showered for the day. The three younger kids weren’t planning to shower until that night. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get the water fixed. If we didn’t have hot water by the next morning, we would either have to go without showering or travel to someone else’s house to rinse off. Our house was no longer capable of meeting our basic needs. This was worse than losing the internet, if only barely. I texted my plumber, the one contractor who never lets me down.
He let me down. I figured he might. We weren’t the only people that morning who had exploding pipes, although we were probably the only ones whose pipe exploded because a kid left a basement door open and didn’t tell anyone. He recommended that I reach out to every plumber whose phone number I could find and hire whichever one could get to my house first. I decided to go a different route: I texted Bob.
