A few setbacks at the shop recently…

Just wanted to make a quick blog post to give everyone a heads up on why I’ve been so hard to get a hold of this week.

I went out to lunch a few days ago and when I returned, the street was completely flooded with muddy water. After a little investigation, I found the source of the problem. It seemed as if there as a broken pipe at the rear of the shop.

I called the property manager and he sent some plumbers out to take a look. As you can see from the photo, the break is right underneath the power transformer for the building. None of the plumbers wanted to shut off the water until the power company came to shut off the power to make sure no one would get shocked. Unfortunately the power company didn’t make it out to the site for several hours, so the water just flowed and flowed.

With the water finally shut off, it was determined that the water main from the fire sprinkler system was the culprit. It is located directly inside of the corner of the building where the break had occurred.

From there once the water had settled, a sinkhole started to form. You can see that the transformer is already leaning into the hole a bit. At this point, I was told the hole would be filled and the transformer would be propped up and everything would be good to go in a day or so.

I returned to the shop this morning hoping everything would be back up and running, only to find that the sinkhole is now HUGE, the transformer has been removed, and I still don’t have any water or power in the shop.

I have no idea when this will be fixed, but until it is I will still be tough to get a hold of. I hope this will get fixed quickly, however at it’s current pace I suspect it will be at least another day or two.

If you’re waiting on an order or need a status update, I’ll do my best to keep you up to date but I legally I’m not allowed to be at the shop until the fire system is back up and running because of the flammable nature of the materials we work with. So I can’t ship finished orders or complete nearly finished orders until I get the okay from the fire department.

Feel free to email me at matt@ocarbon.com if you have any questions.