@usefewersyllables
No good reason not to have a Dry System installed in that building. City/County Plan Check miss that big time.
Hell, it's in the National Code.
Went through the office of Greased Palms and Special Decisions I bet.
Thanks for the post.

Yeah, mon- tons of fun. The apartment complex where we've temporarily come to roost is about 25 years old. At the start of the cold snap, the management sent out a blast message to all residents saying to keep thermostats at 68 or above, and to do the faucet-drip thing to avoid pipe freezing. We knew that that was the first sign of trouble to come, since there are people who will see any such directive and say "You can't tell me what to do!", and do the opposite. But we did it anyway, and then buckled up to see what would happen (that hopefully wouldn't have us having to move for the 4th time after the fire).

The first flood was at the (newly-refurbished) clubhouse, late on the night of the 23rd. The next was in the building across the street, at about 5am on the 24th. And then, at about 10:30am on the 24th, the fire alarm on our building started going off. There was lots of shouting and running around upstairs, and we ventured out to find that the folks above us had broken a pipe and started flooding. Luckily, their extra upstairs bedroom is mostly above their garage, so all the water went that direction, and we miraculously stayed dry. The cascade of water into the street was impressive.

And then the story gets interesting. In all 3 cases, the pipes that froze and broke were part of the fire sprinkler system that is required by law in multifamily dwellings, and not in any tenant-controllable plumbing. All the failures were in the top floors, in the sprinkler runs in the attic spaces, up above the joists.

Which leads me to ask the rhetorical question: what sort of cloth-eared, rectocranial invert, rat-faced *imbecile* designed a *wet sprinkler system* for a residential building in a climate where subzero temps are common? You see, ideally a sprinkler system is maintained dry: it is only taken wet to test it for inspection before occupancy (and then periodically thereafter, for insurance recertification). But after testing, it should be completely drained of water. The system is then filled with compressed air, at the correct pressure to slightly overbalance the local water pressure in the standpipe. If a sprinkler head then opens due to the presence of heat, the compressed air rushes out, allowing the water to refill the plumbing and flow to the seat of the fire. The fire panel senses the water rushing in to replace the compressed air by the opening of an automatic one-way flapper valve in the standpipe. That valve opening is what sets off the building alarm.

Sprinkler plumbing filled with air won't freeze and break. Sprinkler plumbing filled with water, and not properly (and expensively) insulated, is damned near guaranteed to do so at -14degF. So either the architect/designers of the place, or more likely the building inspectors who did the most recent testing, really dropped the ball on that one.

In any case, our building now has inop fire sprinklers, until such time as they replace the broken hardware (and the ceiling that came down upstairs). And I'm dropping a dime on the local building inspectors (as well as the South Metro Fire people) to find out WTF, even though I know that I risk getting us red-tagged out of the place and thrown back into nomad status. Winter ain't over, yet- we're barely even started. Jeez...

Just another question to add to the list to ask when we move into a new place in the future, if we stay around here where it gets cold. Fun times!

@enhydra lutris
Reduce, reuse, repurpose, repair, or recycle.
I remember the Wankle engine. Quite a piece of engineering, and it worked pretty good.
But naw, I got the 2000 cc inline four banger, bulletproof motor though. Rebuilt it at 300k and still going strong. Bought it at police impound for $265 and rebuild was around $1000.
The most amazing thing about it? It has an 8 foot bed! Unheard of anymore unless you spend $100k.
It was one of the reasons I passed on the Ford. Don't need a five passenger, four door oversized sedan with-out a trunklid.
Thanks for the catch on the tread (thread).
Have yourself a merry new year.

that came to my mind was that the word "thread" in your "open thread" tag is mispelled as "tread" which is why it only shows up in "recent threads". Glad no freeze damage to your place. We too have rain, lots of it, and temp around 57.

The old environmental 3 Rs -reduce, reuse, recycle - needs a fourth r - repair. The EFF has been fighting to establish a "right to repair" since a lot of more recent shit can't be repaired legally, and, in many cases, at all. They did get legislation passed in NY, but the gobernator won't sign it because Apple, Micro$hit, and similar tech empires oppose it and own her. I just gotta know if your Mazda was a Wanker Wankle. We generally keep vehicles at least 10 years, but we also generally don't put a ton of miles on them either.

Happy in-between-holidays interregnum.

be well and have a good one