TheBanyanTree: Cold Snap

[sash at remsset.com]

Yesterday was, apparently, a trial run.

We had been warned, you see, that Portland was going to be hit by snow. 
This is in addition to the blanket that came and went during New Year's
week.  Some big cold front was moving in followed by some other wet front
- or smacked sideways by a front - I dunno.  Lots of blue lines on the
weather map and it looked like it was all Canada's fault.  (A popular
excuse for our area right now.)

So we warned all the parents yesterday as they brought their little
darlings back from the long holiday break.

"If you see snow in Portland, that's your cue to call!"

"Make arrangements now, we may do an early release!"

"We'll follow the Portland Public School closing, so check out KATU and
KGW on the TV or the web!"

And it was a cold one yesterday.  I don't know the numbers but I'm a cold
weather babe and it had me reaching for an overcoat.

And to keep things exciting, the furnace was being, well, temperamental.

We are blessed with a beautiful campus - 8 acres just minutes from
downtown Portland, a classic, turn of the century school house with a
rolling front lawn, blacktop, state-of-the-art play structures, and a
soccer field.  As is often the case, however, old buildings with lots of
character come with wiring and heating full of character.

The furnace - a gas-burning, boiler-and-duct work contraption, is about 75
years old.  It burps and belches and has always intimidated the heck out
of me.  It reminds me of my grandmother's cast iron pressure cooker and
the image of that thing blowing mashed potatoes all over her ceiling was
permanently etched into brain when I was six.

So I wasn't thrilled to hear an alarm going off in the boiler room when I
stopped by the school during break.  I called our handy-man guy who knows
the most about the beast, and he walked me through a shut down and manual
restart.

Now, I'm not six years old anymore, but this thing is significantly larger
than Edna's pressure cooker.  While the potential for explosion is
probably not as great as I imagine, the destruction in such an event would
be pretty impressive.  I watched the dials, adjusted the water level, and
waited for the pilot light to kick on - all the while picturing the
haz-mat crew finding just my glasses and my ankle bracelet in the crater
that use to be the gym.

At least it distracted me from the asbestos warning signs all over the pipes.

There were several more phone consultations and boiler room visits over
the weekend to make sure everything was a go for Monday morning.  Couldn’t
have the kids return to a school that hadn’t been heated for two weeks!

The main symptom was that none of the automatic controls that had been
cobbled-on through the years were working properly – from the 60 year old
thermostats through the 1970’s timer with wheels for each day of the week
and metal pins inserted for every scheduled on and off right up to the
digital, environment-protecting oil tank sensor.  The only remaining
control was organic – a nervous biped (circa 1964).  So every time the
furnace kicked off, I would run down and turn off the fans (to keep from
sucking frigid air across the coils), go through the cycle again, cross my
fingers, and fire up the pilot light.

Monday morning, the alarm (indicating a malfunction of the remaining
operating system) went off four times in the first 90 minutes.

Sigh.

I kept nursing it along, knowing that our landlord (Portland Public
Schools) would come any time to make it all better, but by about 9:00 we
had to acknowledge that it wasn’t getting any warmer in there.

Oh, I was keeping the furnace going and had managed to take off the
initial chill in the early hours before the students arrived, but the
children were still wearing their coats, the admin staff was having
trouble typing, and the teachers were all whining.  Except those from
Senegal and Somalia – they were just looking frightened by the whole
experience.

We were just fixin’ to call the parents for an early release – not because
of the weather outside but because of the weather INSIDE – when the PPS
folks arrived.

The younger tech kept saying useful things like “Is this really your only
heater???” and “I can’t believe this thing hasn’t blown up!” but the older
tech was able to teach me more about that beast than I EVER wanted to
know.  By the time they left, I could read the ancient thermometers, open
and shut the various vents to pull air in from the boiler room, heat it,
and then point it at different sets of radiators throughout the school. 
We couldn’t do anything about it randomly filling the boiler room with
steam or the moaning of the more distant radiators, but I could keep the
building warm and was fairly sure that I wasn’t going to be killed or
hideously maimed.  The children shed their coats and the teachers all
relaxed (except Massene who either needs to acquire some body fat or
invest in a few more sweaters!)

By the end of the day, the furnace had a new nickname (Myrtle), the
teachers all thought I was a miracle worker (never a bad thing), and we
had an updated emergency contact list and phone tree for notifying parents
of school closures (one of those jobs we kept meaning to get to
)

This morning, the sun peeked out and revealed 3 inches of crunchy, dry,
crystalline snow.  Portland Public Schools announced their closure about
6:00 am and by 7:30 our spiffy new phone tree had done its magic, the
staff and news sources were notified, the school voice mail was updated
(in French and English), and I was curled up on my couch with a cup of
coffee and a book.

Snow continues to fall as I type this.  There is about 6” of snow outside,
it is bitterly cold, and they predict freezing rain for tomorrow
afternoon.  It’s looking real unlikely that any of us will venture forth
in the morning.

Yesterday was a terribly stressful day but, without that trial run, today
would have been even more awful and I would never have been able to manage
the whole thing from my warm, safe living room.

There’s a lesson there somewhere.

I just hope that I can remember this the next time everything is falling
apart and I come to the shocking realization that no one else is gonna fix
it and that I AM, appallingly enough, the grown-up in charge.

-sash