City of Winnipeg tackles record number of frozen pipe calls

The number of calls the City of Winnipeg received on Wednesday about frozen pipes was the highest – by far – over the past decade.

The city said Friday that they received 281 no-water calls that day, eclipsing the previous record of 123 from December 2017.

“It’s wet, it’s cold, it’s miserable, it’s harder on our equipment. So cold weather temperatures do pose a challenge that way to working operations,” said the city’s head of Water Operations, Tim Shanks.

This week was so cold, in fact, that the number of calls on Thursday, 161, also beat the previous record.

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The city said that as of Friday morning, they still had more than 200 addresses with frozen pipes left to attend to.

“It’s not always convenient for us to meet them at 9 or 10 in the morning and they’ll say ‘Can you come back later in the evening?’

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“When we are trying to juggle appointments around to get to people that adds to the overall number of backlog,” Shanks said.

The temperature in Winnipeg has warmed up from the bone-chilling days earlier in the week.

Friday’s high of -12 C is a far cry from windchill values of -50.

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