We’ve been watching the temperatures in the places where we used to live. Montana, Chicago, North Dakota, Idaho and South Dakota have all seen temperatures in the double digits below zero over the weekend. In contrast, the lowest temperature we saw here was 5 above and that didn’t last long. Last night’s temperature was 15 degrees, similar to the night before.

Fifteen degrees, however, has been fairly damaging around here. On Saturday a team of volunteers spent most of the day cleaning up water damage from broken pipes at our church and I joined other volunteers yesterday afternoon going back to the church building to vacuum more water from the church basement after yet another leak was discovered. Frankly, we don’t know how many other leaks will appear as temperatures rise above freezing, which is forecast for today.

Around our neighborhood, we have seen several houses with large sheets of ice spreading from garages, which is likely due to freezing pipes. We had a frozen pipe in our garage two winters ago. Fortunately for us, I discovered the break while the pipe was still frozen and turned off the water supply to that spigot and was able to have it repaired without experiencing a leak. We also experienced a freeze-up of a water line feeding a shower, but that line was PEX polyethylene tubing which can expand quite a bit without bursting. The line, however, is installed in an exterior wall of our home and remains vulnerable to cold temperatures. Fortunately we know of the problem and can allow a bit of water flow in that pipe when it gets cold to prevent freezing.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of buildings in our county that are not constructed to withstand cold temperatures. We lived for 25 years in our South Dakota home during which we saw temperatures as low as 25 below zero and never suffered any frozen pipes. Our house there was also more tight around the doors and windows than the home in which we now live. Despite having had all of the insulation in the crawl space replaced in this home since we moved in, the floors on the ground level are colder than our South Dakota home, which had a full basement.

The lack of winter awareness in buildings around here is a bit of a surprise to us. We know that this isn’t the first time that our county has experienced deep freezes. Many years ago, Dutch settlers in the area decided to establish tulip fields similar to those in their native country. After several winters when the bulbs failed to be fully productive because of deep freezes, the tulip producers moved south to Skagit County where the tulips have flourished, making it the top region of the nation in the production of tulip bulbs. Back then, they knew about frost danger in the area where we live. Still home construction around here seems to have lagged behind the standard in other parts of the country when it comes to preparedness for cold weather.

Back in the winter of 2021-22, the year we bought out home when we discovered the garage plumbing that is vulnerable to freezing, I was fortunate to have a neighbor who worked for a large plumbing company. I called the number on his van, parked in his driveway and was able to have a plumber come and repair the pipe the same day I noticed the problem. That plumber told me that by the time they got to my house there were so many calls for emergency plumbing services that their company had needed to bring in additional people to handle the phone call volume. He said they had more than 300 unanswered messages on their voice mail that came in while there were multiple employees answering the phones.

There is a similar demand for plumbing services in our county once again. And, I suspect that there will be even more burst pipes discovered over the next couple of days when temperatures are forecast to be above freezing once again.

Retrofitting houses to cope with cold weather is much more difficult than building them to weather standards in the first place. The only practical solutions I can imagine for the exposed pipes in our house are to do a complete bathroom remodel and relocate the shower head that is currently on an outside wall to an interior wall or to remove the siding from that wall of our home and fur out and add another layer of insulation to that entire wall before replacing the siding. Neither solution is inexpensive. Constructing the home with no plumbing in exterior walls adding sufficient insulation and properly sealing all doors and windows would have been relatively inexpensive at the time the home was originally constructed. Those simple construction standards observed in most of the rest of the country, however, are not the way homes are built in this area. This house is the newest house we have ever lived in. Fortunately we have fewer problems than many others in our area. We are also fortunate that our son, who lives in a hundred year-old farmhouse doesn’t have water freezing problems in their home. Their primary heat source in their home is their wood stove, but they also have an electric furnace that will keep their home from freezing should they travel during the winter. They do have some frost problems with pipes that supply water to farm animals, but fortunately they do not have cows on the place at present so we were able to drain those pipes prior to this cold snap.

So we are not suffering with the cold. Probably my biggest concern is with the bees in our apiary, and their hives are well insulated. I did the insulation my self. And the bees are a variety that are known for their winter resilience. They were in good shape going into the cold weather, but I will not check them until it is above freezing and the sun is on the hives so that I don’t allow heat to escape from the hives when I lift the lid to check. For now, I will watch and wait. While I wait, I can be available to volunteer cleaning up water at the church should I get a call about more broken pipes.