After the flood comes the fire.

My Hubby was gone for the week.  We had the flood with disaster control coming in to help clean up.  I was cleaning the front room and "uncovered" the fire place.  This was around midnight on a Friday night.  I wondered if it still worked.  That was a bad idea.

I turned on the gas, and held a barbeque lighter where I thought the gas line was.  I burned up a bunch of cobwebs, but no fire.  Suddenly - KABOOM! There was a big fire flash, but no fire.  I put the lever back in place, went to the bathroom and my face was lightly burned with about half an inch of my hair that framed my face.  Also, now I have no eyebrows!

I slathered on some aloe vera I have in the fridge.  I thought about it and decided to go to emergency to see if everything was OK.  They said I had done the right thing and with time everything would be alright.

I got home about 1:30 a.m.  The house smelt gassy.  I decided to call the gas company just to be safe.  Boy, the rules they have.  I needed to leave my house and walk 350 feet away.  How much is that anyway?  Don't start my car.  Don't turn anything off or on.  It was pretty cold.  I DID turn on the front porch light and open the door and I walked across the street and walked up and down for a while.  I was freezing.  I snuck back in and grabbed a couple of quilts.  Then I waited and waited.  Now it's 2:30 in the morning and a couple of huge trucks slowed down.  I heard heavy metal from the first truck.  We have some crazy neighbors that come home late, so I just thought it was them.  About 10 minutes later the guys hopped out.  I walked over to the truck and saw it was the gas company.  I identified myself and they took out their meters.  They went to the fireplace and there wasn't any gas leaks.  Guess I had turned it off properly.

But, they still detected a gas leak.  They found it in the basement.  They ended up turning off my gas and putting a sticker on that only a qualified technician could remove.  They left about 5:30 a.m.

On Saturday I had made commitments,  so I left for the day.  When I got home the hubs was there.  I had to tell him that we didn't have any gas and I had to tell him about the flood, too.  We called a couple of those 24 hour services to see if they could fix our gas line, but the best any one could do was Monday.

On Monday Nick came out.  He fixed the pipe, after shutting off all of the gas appliances.  When he was done, the water tank wouldn't fire up.  We ended up having to get a new hot water tank, which couldn't be installed until Tuesday.  When Nick got out old tank to the street he said it was the worst one he had ever seen.  Plus it was 18 years old, so it had given more life than most.

All in all - it was an expensive week!  Hopefully not to be repeated anytime soon.