I have been going through my 1993 Diary and discovered all of the problems I had to deal with that year. I have already mentioned that our waterline froze in the middle of February, leaving us without water until it finally thawed out on April 24. When we finally got our water back, I discovered that during those months without water, our hot water tank gave up the ghost.
When I removed the broken hot water tank, I found that the floor beneath it, and under our shower was rotting, so I began to take the floor out so I could replace it. Beneath the particle board on top of the floor, I found 2 x 4’s laid together, side by side, that were also beginning to rot. I prepared to saw their ends, and pull them away from the floor joists, which were still in good shape.
Shortly after I began to saw them with my electric skill saw, our power went off, and not only at our house, but all over the Robson Valley. It was caused by a forest fire in Albreda, 60 miles away. The power outage continued for 16 hours. Since I could not use my skill saw, I had to use a handsaw which more than quadrupled the time it took.
I was able to continue to deconstruct my bathroom after work the following days, but then the day after that, I was confronted with another problem: We lost our water again.
This time it was not due to freezing, but because the culvert which is in the middle of a waterfall, filled up with rocks and boulders, preventing water from going into the intake of our waterline. Our weather had suddenly changed to hotter than usual temperatures, which caused rapid snow melt on the mountaintops. All of the creeks in the Valley became engorged with torrents of water, moving rocks and boulders down stream.
I went up with Tracy, who was living next door, to try and get our water flowing again. We had designed our culvert with a cutout area on one side of its base. That cutout area was sealed by a watergate, a 2 x 12 inch board, which could be raised to let the water in the culvert run out of the bottom of our culvert.
With our culvert filled with rock, we could not raise the watergate, so Tracy and I stood in the torrents of water, and began removing the top layer of rocks that were filling the culvert. The Sunbeam Creek remained flowing rapidly into the culvert, and immediately filled the space created by the removed rocks with water. We removed what we could by standing along the side of the culvert, but eventually, I tried to climb into the culvert so I could reach and throw out those rocks that were lower.
I almost got washed down Sunbeam Falls by the force of the water against my body. Fortunately Tracy prevented it by grabbing me. At that point we realized that Sunbeam was just rushing too furiously, and was too dangerous. So we gave up and walked back home.
I had taken the day off work to get that accomplished, but when I went back to work the next day I noticed that two of my neighbors, who had water systems on Sunbeam Creek were absent. They had also lost their water from all of the debris being washed down the creek, and had to spend yet another day at home trying to get their water back.
After getting home from work, Glen and I hiked back up to our culvert, to see what we could do to get our water back. We began to remove some more rocks that had refilled our culvert overnight, one as big as a watermelon, but soon we gave up because it was still too dangerous, Sunbeam was just running too hard. The force of the water coming down falls to our culvert was scary.
The torrents of water cause by the sudden very warm temperatures melting the snowpack, caused problems on all of the creeks in the Robson Valley. Highway 16 had been closed when a debris flow covered the highway near Tete Jaune. The only other route east was on the Tete Jaune/Croydon Forest Road, but even Forest Service employees where not allowed to travel it, due to the danger of the rushing creeks.
Two days later, Sunbeam Creek had mellowed, and Glen and I went up to see if we could finally accomplish something. Once we got most of the rocks removed from the culvert, we were able to pry up the watergate, which caused those remaining rocks at the very bottom of the culvert to be flushed out. This completely freed up our intake pipe and water once again began running down our line to our houses.
However, It wasn’t until June, that I finally had our bathroom completed to the point where the plumbing was all done on the sink, toilet, and shower, and had finally gotten an electrician to come over and wire up the hot water heater that had caused all of the trouble in the first place.
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