A couple of days ago I talked about the hole in our driveway. Well not much has happened on the fixing front but I have done something in the draining front: After a period of staring at the damp hole and wondering what I could do to drain it I recalled the idea of the syphon and after a certain amount of experimentation I managed to get two syphons working using garden hoses which drained the hole quite nicely. Unfortunately I discovered that they drained the hole so dry that the syphon effect stopped so is quickly filled up again. But, after sorting out a bit of gravel blockage, I managed to position one hose such that it remained syphoning continuously and the road outside our house was filled with a stream of water descending the hill - logically you would expect it to drain into the nearest storm drain but our street doesn't have any of those new-fangled things so it has to go all the way down the hill to the (choked) ditch at the bottom...
I admit I had an addtional motive for doing this, namely that I wanted to make it clear to any Lyonnaise des Eaux inspector where the leak was as I didn't have the greatest confidence in their ability to read house numbers and the like. Well it worked a treat, sort of, in that it certainly drew attention to the leak. But despite phone calls from me, the plumber, all the neighbours who live downhill, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and a host of others Lyonnaise des Eaux are unwilling to proceed with any great speed.
A nice young man showed up yesterday excavated the putative hydrant in the road that might have been the place to switch off the water and discovered that it wasn't and went away saying something about returning on Monday. This seemed surprising given that Monday is a public holiday as well as irritating given that you'd think they would want to stop the road from flooding but that was all. The same young man showed up this evening too to have another poke around - I think he was hoping to find evidence that it wasn't "his" problem - but he was willing to accept that the evidence unanimously points to it being "his" problem and that its what a mathematicial would classify as non trivial. You see we have, by process of elimination removed all known sources of the water and - as I noted last time - also we have not actually located the pipe that is leaking. Lots of metal detectors and digging (through concrete and/or tarmac) will be required to locate the pipe and stop it. Meanwhile the hedge is getting a LOT of water in suitably downslope locations. I hope it enjoys it ...