Water Leak

A few weeks ago we had gone out to eat for supper and on the drive back home Tania mentioned she thought there was a water leak on the side of the house. Its street side on which I don't normally drive so I wouldn't have seen it. When we got home I walked over and seen fresh water running from our lawn, over the curb and into the storm drain, not exactly normal for 18° weather. After looking around a little more I notice water coming out around the cover to the water meter.

Our water meter is inside a 30 gallon barrel buried in the lawn. I took the mini man hole cover off of it and seen it was not only completely full of water but over running. Like an idiot I took my coat off and stuck my arm in the pit to see if I could feel any leaks, I could hear it leaking but it was so cold my hand and arm went completely numb in about five seconds.

Not having any way to drain the barrel, I called a buddy and was over at his house at 10:30pm borrowing two of his sump pumps. One made short order of draining the barrel and within three minutes I was able to look down at everything, there was no leak in the barrel and no movement on the meter. I could see the water running down the inside of the barrel from the street side so it was obviously leaking on the water companies side of the street some five feet under the dirt.

After putting away the pumps and cords I came inside and called the emergency leak number for the water company. I told the nice lady on the phone what the problem was and what I had done. She commented on most people not going to that extreme before calling and I explained I wanted to validate it was their problem to fix and not mine. That's when she informed me the line isn't drawn at the meter its where ever the easement is, great...

The next day they sent a guy out in a van, he looked around a bit and pulled out a 12v pump that looked like it belonged in a fish tank. We stood there for 20 minutes while this pump tried to drain more water than was rushing in only for him to come to the same conclusion I had the night before. He informed me that he would need to send out another truck that could locate the leak by sound.

A week later I came home and found this:

It looks like they fond the leak under the slabs, the main shutoff for the block is about 30 feet south of where the slabs were removed. They also managed to break one of the slabs with the backhoe so now Ill have three that dont match.

It will probably be a while bfore they come out and pour them, its too cold to do it now. The more important thing is, I still don't know if they are paying for this or I am.