The Story of Cancelled Church

So... church was cancelled last Sunday.  Not because it was the day after New Year's Day or anything fun like that, but because the firemen told us that we couldn't be in our building that day.

The friendly firemen arrive.  That's me in my new suit, freezing.

There were just a few of us in the building that morning, as we had just started our 7:00 bishopric meeting.  We were sleepily going through our ward business when the fire alarm went off.  Mildly concerned, our bishop sent his first counselor -- "the expendable one" -- to go check it out.  A minute or so later, he came back and said that something didn't smell right and he could hear a 'whooshing' sound.  Not sure what the problem was, we evacuated into the 8-degree morning air.  We didn't see or smell any smoke outside, although I fully expected to see our building burst into flames at any moment.  

Here's an action shot of our bishop, sauntering over to talk to the firemen.

Our bishop spoke with the fire captain, who told him that our fire suppression sprinkler system had malfunctioned somehow.  He said that water and glycol (hence the funny smell) were gushing into our building (hence the 'whooshing' sound).  Bishop came back to us, told us that church was cancelled and that we needed to go home and come back in work clothes to help clean up the mess.  He also instructed his counselor (the expendable one) to call the Relief Society President, the Elders Quorum President, and the High Priest Group Leader so that they could start a phone tree to inform the ward that church was cancelled and to request a handful of men to come with Shop-Vacs to help in the clean up.

Some firemen cleaning up water in the cultural hall, obviously happy that our fire alarm woke them up.

When I got back to the church after changing from my suit into jeans and a sweatshirt, the firemen had shut off the water to the fire sprinkler lines and were already busy squeegeeing (hey, that's a real word, apparently... no red underline to tell me it's misspelled) the hardwood floor in the cultural hall.  Shortly after I took that picture they got a call to go on a real fire, so they had to leave the bulk of the clean up to us.  (As I write this, I'm starting to wonder if maybe they weren't having any fun cleaning up the mess so they made up the fire call as an excuse to leave.  Hmmm...)

A bunch of guys hard at work with their Shop-Vacs.

So about 25 or so guys came over, ready and willing to help clean up the mess.  Then, with all the vacuums running, they started tripping circuit breakers.  Apparently the circuits in that church building weren't designed to have 25 vacuums running at the same time.  Weird.

More guys working hard.  It's a fuzzy picture because I take fuzzy pictures.  I also do weddings.

We got most of the water cleaned up over the course of a few hours.  And then the firemen showed up again to collect the equipment and squeegees they had left when they went to that "other call."

The firemen, returning from the "fire" to collect their stuff.

I went back to the building Tuesday night for another bishopric meeting.  By that time, a professional disaster clean up company had been called.  They had set up a big heat bubble thing in the cultural hall to extract any remaining water from the hardwood floor.  That was pretty cool to see, so of course, I forgot to take a picture of it.  Just imagine a huge sheet of plastic covering the floor, then imagine that sheet of plastic inflated so that it was about 6 feet high at the highest point.  If you are imagining correctly you will be thinking of something like this...

I didn't take this picture.  I found it on the Internet.

...only indoors and not so big and not for tennis.  Anyway, this bubble thing was covering the floor, and they were pumping 120-degree air inside it and sucking water out of the floor.  It was pretty impressive.  

We still don't know if we're going to be able to have church in our building this Sunday.  If the fire suppression sprinklers haven't been fixed and recharged, then we won't be able to meet there.  Also, if the carpets haven't been shampooed yet, then we won't want to meet there, since the rooms that got the worst mess were the nursery and primary rooms.  Maybe we'll have to have church at another building.  If that's the case, then we will probably only have Sacrament Meeting.  And that will be just fine with me!

So that's the story of cancelled church.

Oh yeah, I have one more picture to show.  It's our church building's attic.  I went up there for a few minutes at one point when I wasn't squeegeeing or taking pictures of other people working.  Here it is:

Church attic.  Pretty spectacular, isn't it?