By Ronnie Blair
Christmas in Florida is what you would expect.
Air-conditioning systems humming instead of fireplaces roaring. Parents wearing shorts and flipflops as they watch their child try out the new bicycle Santa Claus delivered. Northern birds reveling in the fact they migrated south for friendlier weather.
Which is why I was surprised one year when our water pipes froze on Christmas Eve.
It’s disconcerting to awaken on Dec. 24 with a host of holiday activities to attend to only to discover that nothing happens when you turn on the kitchen faucet to make coffee. I stared uncomprehendingly for a few moments and experimented with other faucets before I accepted the brutal truth. Nothing was going to come out of any of them. This was an inopportune time for the city water system to experience problems I thought as I called to find out how soon the city expected to remedy the situation.
“Nothing wrong on our end,” a chipper water department employee assured me. “Probably your pipes froze.”
“My pipes froze? This is Florida, remember?”
He remembered and suggested I find a plumber.
I didn’t yet know it but our home was just one more victim of what became known as the Christmas Freeze of 1989. The freeze caused consternation – and tragedy – throughout the state. The temperature dropped to 23 degrees in the Tampa Bay area where I live, but some parts of Florida endured even worse conditions, probably making newer residents wonder why they bothered to move down from Michigan or Maine. In the tiny North Central Florida community of High Springs, the temperature plunged to a record-low eight degrees. Pensacola clocked in at 11 degrees, and the state capital in Tallahassee experienced a low of 13. Everywhere, Floridians joined in a collective and unfamiliar “brrrrr.”
A fact sheet that the Florida Department of Health put together sometime later called the period from Dec. 22 to 26 of 1989 “one of the most severe cold waves in [the state’s] history with record-breaking temperatures, snow, ice, sleet, and hard freezes. Claiming at least 26 lives, power and transportation were shut down over much of Florida, with heavy losses in the agricultural industry.”
Gov. Bob Martinez was quoted in the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale as saying, “From what I have seen, there is no question that Florida has suffered devastating losses and that our state is a disaster area. We must now do everything we can to help those whose lives and livelihoods have been ravaged by unmerciful weather.”
Fifteen years later, reporter Bill Bair of The Ledger in Lakeland wrote a retrospective article in which Charlie Paxton of the National Weather Service explained how weather patterns 4,000 miles away contributed to Florida’s bizarre Christmas woes. In late December 1989, an unusually large pool of frigid air collected over Alaska as a high-pressure system dominated weather off the West Coast of the United States. “When a low-pressure system formed off the southeast coast of the United States,” Bair wrote, “the cold air from Alaska rode a deep trough in the jet stream straight into the Sunshine State.”
My frozen pipes were a mere annoyance in comparison to what many others were experiencing. Still, those pipes needed to be dealt with – and quickly if holiday plans were to remain intact. The Yellow Pages helped me locate a plumber and the plumbing company’s dispatcher added me to the growing list of frantic customers. Then I waited, eying the blueberry muffins I had baked the night before. One of those would have provided a tasty treat with the Christmas Eve morning coffee, had there been any Christmas Eve morning coffee. My caffeine fix would need to wait.
Fortunately, I was an early riser so I was near the top of the plumbing company’s list. A middle-aged plumber soon arrived along with a roughly 20-year-old apprentice, who was adding “how to unfreeze pipes” to his growing repertoire, although it was a skill he might never use again.
The plumber tried out my faucets and puzzled over where to begin. Then, as he, the apprentice, and I stood back outside in the un-Florida-like air, our breath visible in a manner unfamiliar to Floridians, the plumber’s expression changed from perplexed to “aha!” He had spotted a ditch near the road and a pipe that was briefly exposed as it crossed that ditch. That pipe connected my house to the city’s water supply. This exposed pipe was the culprit behind my woes.
“Technically, that’s the city’s pipe and it’s their responsibility to fix it for you,” the plumber said.
But no one from the city stood in my yard at that moment. The plumber did. I told him I would be more than happy to pay for his services right now rather than wait to see if the city could or would send someone out before nightfall.
He nodded and retrieved a small torch from his truck. Then he walked over to an outside faucet, turned it on (nothing came out, of course), and told me to act as lookout. When the water flowed, I was to let him know that he had been victorious.
I kept an eye on the faucet as, back near the street, the attentive apprentice watched as the plumber went to work with the torch, a tricky task because he needed to heat the pipe enough to melt the ice without damaging the city’s property. My faucet-watching assignment was much easier, though frustrating.
Nothing. Nothing … until something. Water gushed out; beautiful unfrozen water that flowed without restraint and heralded that Christmas was coming after all. So was coffee.
“It’s working,” I yelled.
The plumber didn’t hear, but the apprentice did, relayed my message, and the torch stopped. The two of them followed me inside the house where I wrote the check. As a bonus, I offered each of them a blueberry muffin.
Then off they went, muffins in hand, two of Santa’s elves bringing the gift of unfrozen pipes to every household they visited.
Ronnie Blair is author of the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up On Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.
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