As for numbers,!

between 6pm Friday and 8am Monday we responded to 18 calls that were related to water leaks of some sort, all likely related to the pipes freezing.! Of those 18 calls, 14 were to commercial or apartment type buildings (includes UMass buildings) and four were to private residences.! Four of the commercial calls were to UMass buildings.! Also of those 18 total calls, 9 were related to leaks in a sprinkler system pipe (all commercial buildings) and 9 involved domestic water pipes or pipes feeding heat registers.! Remarkably most of the commercial breaks seemed to not have caused signicant damage; the private residences had a little more. ! In answer to your questions it is hard to say as there are a lot of factors.! Commercial buildings are not necessarily more susceptible to having pipes freeze except that most commercial buildings now have sprinkler systems and most residences do not.! Since sprinkler pipes run throughout an entire building to reach every single room and closet there are a lot more pipes involved than what you would have for just domestic water to feed bathrooms and kitchens in a house so in that regard there is a greater chance of having pipes freeze in a commercial building because there are a lot more pipes.! The good part of it is that yes, when a sprinkler system pipe (or sprinkler head) breaks it sends out a re alarm in most cases so someone knows about it right away, as opposed to a private residence where the water will keep owing until someone notices it.! This happened on one of the calls Saturday night where a passerby saw water pouring out the garage door of a house and called the police.! It turns out a water pipe had burst and the family was away in California.! We have had calls in the past where the basement of a house lls up all the way to the bottom of the basement windows like a swimming pool and then ows out the windows before anyone notices it. ! This was an unusually high volume of freezing pipe problems in a short period of time for us, although we do see some it every year.! As we always say, it is not the freezing pipes that are the problem, it is when frozen pipes warm up again and thaw that we have a problem!! I would not be surprised if there are some private residences or apartments out there still that have a

frozen pipes or active leaks that nobody has noticed yet. ! Lindsay !
From: Larry Kelley [mailto:amherstac@aol.com] Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 14:46 To: Stromgren, Lindsay Subject: Water Main breaks
!

Hey Lindsay, Any idea how many water main breaks AFD responded to yesterday?! Are commercial buildings more susceptible or is it just that they have alarm systems that send out the alert automatically?! In other words did as many private homes in Amherst have pipes burst yesterday, but the homeowner did not bother to dial 911? How bad was the water damage at UMass Life Science Lab?! I heard the Mullins Center was not a big deal because the pipe burst in a stairwell, but that the Life Science Lab was a tad worse.! Larry