The Flood on South Forest

Unfortunately, my first days back at the University of Michigan were tainted with some unfortunate occurrences. When I got back to Ann Arbor, I needed to turn my water back on. In order to do so, I had to go to the Ann Arbor City Council and pay them directly. Little to my knowledge, as soon as I paid for the water at the Ann Arbor City Council they turned it back on and the pressure forced all of the faucets in the house to open.

This ordinarily would not have been a problem, except for a single drain on the second floor that happened to be clogged. All of the other drains in the house were able to drain the water that was rushing into them fast enough so that it would not overflow. However, this one drain on the second floor obviously had some issues and therefore, water ended up overflowing from this drain and flooding the second floor.

If this wasn't enough, the water from the second floor then fell through to the first floor and then eventually to the basement below it. As a result, our house has had to undergo intense maintenance. They had to rip out the drywall and dry the inside of the house on the first floor due to concerns of potential warping of the wood in the interior of the house. Wood also takes a while to dry, so it has been a lengthy process, almost two weeks now.

However, what I was interested in, and the reason for me writing this post in the first place, was to explore the volume of water that caused all of this damage. It is really quite amazing to me that a job that will cost around $4,000 and has taken almost two weeks was the result of just a couple hours of not being at home. I wanted to know what volume of water created such damage.

Therefore, in this post, I intend to explore the amount of water that escaped the faucet on the second floor.

• Results

In order to figure out the rate at which water was coming out the faucet, I went directly to the second floor bathroom and timed how quickly the water at full blast would fill a 2.2 liter container. I performed this task 11 times to get an average. I threw out the longest and shortest time that it took to fill the 2.2 liter container, which gave me 9 samples to average.

I found that the faucet at full blast takes 10.18889 seconds to fill a 2.2 liter container. In other words, the rate at which water leaves the faucet is equal to 0.21592 Liters per seconds. The rate is displayed graphically below.


The next step in the process was then to determine how long this occurred for. I went into the Ann Arbor City Council at around noon and then arrived home at 3pm. This means that three full hours passed before I got home.

Due to the fact that I won't ever truly know when they turned on the water, I'll assume that they did it as I paid for the bill, which was 11:49am and I'll assume I arrived home at 3:08pm, because I answered someone's text message at 3:03pm and said I would be back at the house "in five." This means that I was away from the house for 199 minutes total.

If we then understand that there are 60 seconds in a minute, all we have to do is multiply 199 minutes by 60 seconds, which equals 11,940 seconds total that passed.

With this information we can then find out the total volume of water that escaped the faucet in the 199 minutes (11,940 seconds).

If we take 11,940 and multiply this number by the rate of 0.21592 liters, we arrive at a total amount of 2,578.097 Liters (681.06 gallons). We can see the volume of water entering our house in Ann Arbor graphically by the graph below.

• Conclusion

Overall, there was 2,578.097 liters that entered into my house on South Forest in Ann Arbor. This occurred over a span of 199 minutes and was the result of a single faucet that had a rate of 0.21592 liters per second.

To put this in perspective, however, at this rate, in order to fill up an Olympic-size swimming pool (2,500,000 liters), it would take 11,578,308 seconds which equates to 134 days.