Frozen Pipes

So I see a couple of my neighbors preparing for the deep freeze that was forecasted to hit us. I forgot to tell Mario until last night when he is crawling into bed at about 8:30 because he has to be up at 4 for an important conference call at work. He didn't think the pipes would freeze and so he drifted off to sleep. I recall my dad telling me recently that we didn't have anything to worry about here in Arizona about freezing pipes. So I too drifted off to sleep.

Fast forward to 4 am this morning and Mario comes into the room, turns on the bathroom light and when I enquire why, he says, "We have no water." Great! So now I am up at 4 am trying to research online what to do. We are from Florida. We don't know anything about frozen pipes!

We may have not been prepared with the pipes, but at least we were prepared with water storage. I quickly went to the garage, removed all the junk on top of our huge water barrels and began to boil water to use for our pipes.

Then I called my dad to tell him he was wrong, pipes do freeze here. He offered some suggestions which worked immediately to clear the frozen pipes. I felt so bad for Mario having to leave. I know he didn't want to leave me early this morning with no running water to fend for myself and the kids.

It looks like the pipe leading to the sprinklers has a leak so we do have some damage and I don't look forward to telling the landlord that we didn't prepare his pipes last night. My dad said it was his responsibility to cover the pipes, but I think we should have taken care of it. Lesson learned for next time. At least I had my water storage ready.

Update: Even those that covered their pipes had them frozen. In fact, many still don't have water. So I think I was very lucky to know about the problem at 4 am so I could fix it before it froze any further. Now are gas is out also, so no heat in the whole area. Maybe school will be canceled tomorrow.