Water problems

Last weekend was a holiday weekend.  The kids actually had a strange week, because both Monday and Thursday were (unrelated) public holidays.  Many of the Chinese holidays depend on the lunar calendar (like Easter) so the date varies greatly from year to year.  I still haven't gotten used to the fact that the Chinese just celebrate holidays on the day they fall instead of moving them to a Friday or Monday to make it more convenient for working people.  The Thursday before the long weekend, we woke up at 5 AM because the water was blasting out of the sinks in the kids' bathroom.  The faucets were making spluttering noises like there was air in the lines.  Apparently there was a problem with the water lines in the neighborhood and the water had come on with such force that it had turned on the faucets.  The next morning, the water in those faucets was brown, so the landlord had to flush out the lines and we started boiling the water.

Saturday, it had just started raining rather hard.  Tom was upstairs in our bedroom and noticed a water noise that seemed to be more than just the rain on the ceiling.  He went into our bathroom and a pipe had burst and was spraying water and dripping down from the ceiling.  He tried to turn off the water valve at the street, but when that didn't work, he climbed up in the ceiling and turned off the valve on the pipe.  We have a drop ceiling in our bathroom.  Above the ceiling, there is electric as well as a large tank that fills with water and is used to flush our toilets.  There is a pipe that fills the tank that had burst (presumably, the water pressure from the day before had weakened the pipe junction).  I was SO glad Tom had been home.  I would not have known how to turn the water off and wouldn't have been able to reach the pipe to turn it off even if I had.  It definitely made us think what could have happened it the pipe had burst when we had been out of town the previous weekend or over the summer when we were gone for a month.  I texted our landlord's maintenance man to tell him what had happened.  His original response was "Is there a problem?  We are off today."  Really?  There is a burst pipe, water is dripping from the ceiling and our bathroom electric is sitting in a puddle of water.  After a few more messages and a phone call from Tom, he agreed to come over that day.  Most everyone is off on Sundays and Monday was a holiday.  This definitely couldn't wait until Tuesday.  After fixing the pipe twice (it dripped the first time), it was finally fixed by the following Friday.  It was nice to have our bathroom ceiling back in place.  Hopefully, that will be the end of our water problems at this house.

The tank with our flushing water.  

The pipe that burst.  Luckily, it had a shut-off valve