Friday, July 27, 2007

Catastrophic failure

I went out of town for a week and while I was gone, Shane received a late-night knock on the door from maintenance. Apparently, the apartment below us reported water leaking through the ceiling (keep in mind the ceiling is 12" of concrete). Shane shut off the pumps and the auto-refill system and the leak appeared to stop. The next day, he discovered a crack in the back glass that was located inside the overflow box. Over the next day or two, the crack grew so he drained the tank fully. Fortunately, there were no fish in the tank yet and the plants were easily moved to another tank. The wood trim supporting the tank held a lot of water, so damage was minimal.

The poor empty tank:

The crack viewed from the top:

The crack viewed from the back, under the bog . You can see the long curving cracks:


There isn't really much that can be done at that point, so after months of work, we were faced with starting over.

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