In Hot Water

The devil is always in the details and the details are always the devil. You take some simple things and deconstruct them and you end up with capturing an entire universe in a grain of sand and probably even eternity in an hour.

It is Sunday and I’m out of bed late. Lazy day and no plans of doing anything beyond having coffee and reading a book. So the day has to start with a hot shower. Sounds idyllic, right?

It would be. Except there is no water. Ok. Backtrack junior and take things from the beginning. How can there be no water? Where? Have you checked the tap? It’s this kind of monologue that goes through your head when you find yourself in a 21st century flat in the middle of a modern city and with the nearest river, well, here it’s not that far away really, the Neva is everywhere but how do I get water from there to here in a meaningful enough quantity to have a shower and shave?

This is the kind of thought that raced through my head and you see with not a drop of water coming through the cold or hot tap I was suddenly without any water for the shower, shaving, the toilet or the washing machine.

You can’t drink tap water in St Petersburg, not unless you’ve decided you have had enough of life. Residents here buy water in 5 litre bottles so drinking and making coffee was not going to be much of an issue but the toilet…. Uh-uh, this was getting a little worrying.

You begin, of course to wonder why? How? And it inevitably boils down to ideology. Anyone who says ideas cannot save you or damn you knows nothing about the world. Democracy is an idea. So is Communism. And the Protestant Work Ethic.

Ideas have the power to change the way we see everything from the glass being half full as opposed to half empty to day being night and black being white. It is really the case here. In a Communist paradise it was felt that no one should ever want of hot water, or be subject to the vagaries of earning capacity and social status when it came to taking a hot bath.

You have to admire this. Used to stories in the news of UK pensioners cutting back on taking baths and running the heating only during the evening the notion that plentiful, hot water could be easily available to anyone does have a certain appeal.

This is exactly what has happened here. Hot water comes in plentiful supply from the city’s water authority at an incredibly hot temperature. This is where my knowledge of 20th century plumbing kicks in. Think what normally happens: water gets from a pumping station to your house. You want to use it, turn the tap on. You want it hot, get it into a heater and heat up as much as you need.

Not here. Here water comes in two separate pipes: hot and cold. You want cold water, no problem, it would make any Polar Bear feel at home. You want hot, it’s like the gates of Hell have opened up. I’m no water engineer but the logistics do pose a few questions even for me: how do you heat up enough water for everybody in all the city and then make sure everyone, no matter how far away they live from the pumping station gets it at a hot enough temperature to be hot?

Suppose you manage to solve this problem, how do you then, manage the network of pipes which, running at such super-heated temperature must be subject to more wear and tear than usual?

See how a well-intentioned notion, put into practice, leads directly to the road to hell?

I can’t say what temperature the water gets heated to or how much it costs to do this or how they judge the use or what it dos to the environment, but the days when it cost a few kopeks to use are long gone. I have two water meters, one for cold and one for hot and they both measure exactly how much I use.

Then there are the little technical details: The moment the water authority carries out repairs somewhere in the grid I have no hot water, even though the icy-cold tap may be running no problem.

It’s expensive to heat up all that water so they fire up the boiler (or whatever it is they use to heat it up) sometime in the morning. But because they don’t get up early enough, by 7.00am when everyone wants to take showers to get to work the water is not hot enough for that (it’s lukewarm at best).

I am quite lucky. I work from home and don’t hit the shower until about 9.00 or 10.00 am by then the hot water is hot enough to give you third degree burns if you are not careful and because everyone who could have used it is by now on their way to work, and hasn’t, the tube at this hour is a mélange of odours which would make a closed-air bazaar in Kathmandu seem tame by comparison.

Then there is the thing about plumbing. Used to Western plumbing which mixes high-pressure cold water with gravity driven hot water from the boiler, I am used to cold water gaining the upper hand at some point in the mixer tap and making my shower an adventure.

Not here. Up the pressure and the hot water, having a much higher pressure, thanks to its super-heated status, gains the upper hand and blisters your skin before you get the chance to turn the mixer tap handle the other way. This kind of thing acquires greater interest when the increase in pressure (and temperature) happens as you have your eyes full of suds and are trying to blindly find the mixer tap handle and desperately remember which way to turn it to get the cold water flowing again.

And then there are mornings like today. When the water stops.
Oh, and there are of course the industrial accidents when the pipe repair crews working on the hot water pipes get scalded to death quite frequently as super-heated steam or water escapes from a burst pipe.

All this because they tried, at some point, to be different, socially equal. Create a better world. By the time I have written all this the water is back on, running a dirty brown from some repairs and it looks like I will get my Sunday morning shower and lay about reading my book.

In case you’re wondering no one can drink the water because the water pipes here are so old that there are things there which had they been in Saddam’s possession during the Iraq war he would have been able to unleash them and overwhelm the American army in its tracks.

As I said, ideology, it can really damn you. Ideas are powerful things, particularly if you apply them and then forget about them and just start doing things because that’s the way you think they should be done.