The Hanscom Family Weblog

Chilliest day of the season causes pipes to burst, vehicles to die

By GEORGE BRYSON
gbryson@adn.com

(01/07/09 21:52:19)
Wednesday was the worst.

Amid the deepest cold snap in a decade, the National Weather Service station in West Anchorage yesterday registered it’s 10th straight day of double-digit negative temperatures — with the coldest day all winter. The mercury fell to minus 19.

But that official reading for Anchorage came in one of the warmest spots in town.

At the University of Alaska Anchorage, early-rising college students there met the day at minus 24. At the Campbell Creek Science Center east of Elmore Road, the caretaker’s expensive thermometer logged minus 31 degrees.

Driving north from Anchorage, the readings fell even further. A frigid spot in Eagle River registered minus 38. In Palmer it was minus 40. In Willow minus 47.

But you didn’t have to go searching for cold this week, Anchorage had plenty to give. For the fourth day out of five, national ski officials at Kincaid Park ruled it too cold for the most elite cross-country skiers in America to compete.

Elsewhere in town Wednesday, cars were dying, pipes were breaking and buildings were catching on fire.

Spurred by the fifth major residential blaze in three days, officials with the Anchorage Fire Department posted an advisory on their Web site urging homeowners not to overload their wood stoves or fireplaces — and to avoid altogether burning such highly combustible materials as cardboard, gift wrapping and tinder-dry Christmas trees.

Plumbers were literally swamped this week, repairing broken pipes. Simple thawing jobs had waiting lists four days out.

“We’re trying to keep up,” said Jeff Cooper, a plumber at Central Plumbing and Heating.

His Midtown business had more than a dozen repairmen in the field. One worked on a house where the pipes were broken in 30 different places. That’s what happens when your furnace goes out at 20 below zero, Cooper said.

“As the water freezes in the pipe, the ice expands down the pipe and hydraulics the water out the side. The pipe bursts at about 3,000 (pounds of water pressure per square inch). You get a bulge and then a split.”

Underground city water lines were breaking as well, despite the protective insulation of a couple of feet of snow. On Tuesday a sporting goods store and the ACS Building on Telephone Avenue lost all their water. On Wednesday the same thing happened to eight homeowners in Turnagain, said Chris Kosinsky, a spokesman for the Anchorage Water & Wastewater Utility.

“The two breaks we had they were both cast iron water lines … (older lines) which get fragile in cold weather,” he said.

Bruce Lee, owner of Arctic Import Repair on International Airport Road, said he started the week with 75 car batteries on his shelf. Early Wednesday, only six were left — and Lee said his mechanics were working 14-hour days trying to get customers with busted radiators and broken car heaters back on the road.

A regional spokesman for the AAA Alaska emergency road service said his central office normally receives about 10 calls a day from the Anchorage area, but it was up to 250 to 300 a day on Wednesday, and he’d brought in extra people to field the calls.

Nate Hardin, a meteorologist with the Anchorage office of the National Weather Service, traces the cold snap to a “very strong pressure ridge” that lodged itself at high altitude over the Bering Sea in late December. As cold Siberian air blew east toward Alaska, the pressure ridge acted like a picket fence, forcing the air stream north, where it grew even colder, before swinging back south through Alaska’s Interior.

“We just kept getting little reinforcing shots of that cold air,” Hardin said. “And when you get a ridge built up like that it’s very difficult to break down. It just keeps reinforcing itself.”

The minus 30-degree morning air at the Campbell Creek Science Center on Monday served as rude homecoming for center caretakers Colleen Carlson and her husband. They’d just returned from Hawaii, where they spent a two-week honeymoon.

“So we had a 110-degree drop — from 80 degrees in Kauai to 30-below here,” Carlson said.

When the taxi driver dropped them off at the science center that morning, one more surprise was waiting: Both of their cars were dead.

Find George Bryson online at adn.com/contact/gbryson or call 257-4318. Daily News staff member Cheryl Chapman contributed to this story.

Copyright © Thu Jan 08 2009 10:54:37 GMT-0900 (AKST)1900 The Anchorage Daily News (www.adn.com)