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Burst Pipe

A split line will keep unloading into the basement until the main valve is closed, so shut it and call rather than waiting for the thaw to finish.

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When this becomes an emergency

What a pro does

Closing the main comes first. After that the plumber works out where the freeze actually happened, and in Michigan that's usually not the middle of the house. It's a line run through an unheated back porch in Owosso, a crawlspace under a 1950s addition in Jackson, or a rim joist near a foundation vent nobody has closed since October. Frost drives down past four feet in the northern towns, so a shallow service line into an old Alpena or Gaylord place is fair game too. The plumber opens up the run, cuts back to sound pipe on both sides of the split, and rejoins with fittings that suit what's already there. Half-inch galvanized in a Saginaw or Bay City house behaves nothing like copper, and it often turns out the freeze only finished off a section that had been closing up with scale for years. Pressure goes back on slowly, and the rest of the cold-side run gets checked, because one freeze night rarely produces exactly one failure.

Frequently asked questions

Because additions and enclosed porches were often framed onto the original structure without matching its wall depth or its heat. A supply line crossing that space sits far closer to outside air than the same line would in the body of the house, and a January night in Flint or Mount Pleasant finds it.
Usually the damage happens while it's frozen, but you find out during the thaw. Ice expanding in a closed section opens a seam, then nothing escapes until the plug melts and pressure returns. That's why a burst often announces itself on the first mild afternoon after a cold stretch.
It fails differently. Decades of scale narrow the bore, so water moves slower and freezes sooner in the same conditions, and a wall thinned by corrosion has less left to resist the ice. Plenty of houses in the older industrial towns still have runs of it behind plaster.
That depends entirely on your policy and how the loss happened, so contact your insurance provider before assuming either way. Photographing the pipe and the wet area before anything gets torn out or dried usually helps whatever conversation follows.

Burst Pipe?

Get connected with a local pro now.

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