Minor chemical spill in Durham, NC disrupts my life.

Friday, about midnight, a pipe carrying DHMO (DiHydrogen MonOxide) to a location used for cleaning burst inside the wall. The DHMO was released into the room, an adjacent bedroom on the same floor, and three rooms on the floor below.

It took about 35 minutes for the DFD to respond and shut of the supply line. They actually did not totally close off the line, and DHMO leaked until Saturday morning about 9am.  The repair technician closed off the main supply completely, show us where the interior shutoff was (in a corner of a utility closet) and repaired the pipe.

Two of the downstairs rooms lost portions of their ceilings, and hundreds of items in a storage room were damaged and soaked by the universal solvent spill.

Fortunately, a DHMO cleanup group was available Saturday afternoon to begin the process of cleanup.  They had a number of specialized tools for removing and storing the DHMO that I hadn't known of.  There are some amazing advances in DHMO handling and removal developed since I last had to deal with such a spill.

So, here on Sunday afternoon, most of the DHMO is removed and the structure is dried and secure. The downstairs storage room is still being subject to forced ventilation and precipitation of the DHMO from the salvageable and unsalvageable items that are there.

I am grateful to my roommates for their promt reactions to this crisis. Without their assistance I would not have been able to deal with the flood.  As I write, a fan is still drying the carpet in my room.

We still have to deal with repairs to the ceilings and walls in the downstairs rooms, but all leaks have been stopped and the main supply has been restored.

DHMO is a solvent used widely in the world for such applications as cleaning, waste removal and chemical reactions in food preparation.  It isn't toxic in reasonable doses, but in sufficiently large volumes it can kill you or cause severe health effects.  For more information, see http://dhmo.org

I should be okay, the only victim in this case is my mental equilibrium.