Just a normal day...or so I thought, until I got a panicked call from a Jerusalem tenant. There was big leak from the ceiling above the shower. She sent me pictures.
That was a big leak. I said that I’d be there in an hour and that I’d send a plumber immediately. This leak was obviously from the neighbor upstairs. So I asked her to speak to the neighbor upstairs in the mean time, to switch off the water from her apartment, so that the flow of water would stop.
One of the tricks of property management is choosing good and capable tenants. It doesn’t always work, but in her I knew I had an exceptionally good and capable tennant. Many tenants would refuse to get involved. They would argue that it’s my job and that it’s up to me to speak to the neighbors. They’re right, but a big leak that developed so quickly, is an emergency and it’s in their interest too to be proactive. She was.
By the time I arrived, the plumber was already there, but there was a far more serious problem. The leak had reached the electricity box and was seeping out from the bottom of the box. That’s very dangerous.
The plumber shut off the electricity and then removed the electricity box from the wall.
Things are always turn out for the best, and this was another one of those cases. My electrician showed how a number of the fuses were rusted through. This is a fire hazard as the rust can cause the electricity to generate extra heat.
There were now two issues to be dealt with. First the burst pipe. That was the responsibility of the neighbor. Fortunately, the dear old lady had a capable young daughter who understood the nature of the problem and sent in her plumber to fix it quite quickly. Once that was done, we had to wait for the wet patches to dry. They dried out quickly with little damage. It was only a small job to scrape down the min damage and paint it over...
The fuses in the electricity box were replaced quite quickly, but the electrician would not put it back into the wall until the area around it had fully dried. That took a couple of days. In the meantime, I asked the electrician to check the wiring of the rest of the apartment to make sure it was safe. It was.
The apartment was back to normal in a couple of days.
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