All YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE CRAWL SPACE

Little known and rarely visited, there’s a crawl space under the centre area of Fort Garry United Church. Access to it is through a metal hatch under the stairs opposite the elevator. Originally it provided space for a boiler pump, but that has now wisely been moved to the Boiler Room. It also provides under-the-floor access for plumbers and electricians. It has a sump pump, without which we’d have a pond under much of the church. Unfortunately, sump pumps tend to have a life of about 10 years, and historically the space flooded every time the pump failed. The area then had to be pumped out and the sump pump replaced. 

On one occasion, we had a failure in a pipe which returned heating system water from the Christian Education Building to the boiler. By the time that it was discovered, we had a crawl space full of hot water. 

After that shock, we added a high-water alarm and a back-up sump pump. 

The environment in the crawl space can best be described as unpleasant, as we can tell from the photo. Aaron Smith and Bruce Jacobs are emerging victorious, after completion of a Crawl Space project in 2007. We can learn from the photo that:

- The space is dark, hence the flashlight; there’s only a single light bulb, and if that failed while you were down there, it wouldn’t be pleasant. 

- It’s obviously humid. 

- It’s wet, notice my soaked sleeve. 

- Headroom is limited and you need to get down on your knees, hence the knee pads. 

- But worst of all, there’s the mud. It’s not ordinary mud, it’s Red River gumbo. It has been said of this fine sticky clay that it’s a unique muddy fiasco. It is also described as a mixture of dense clay and superglue. I agree with those definitions, because I tried to dig a short, shallow trench down there. It takes super strength to get the clay onto the shovel, and then you can’t shake it off the shovel. It has to be scraped off. After that, you have to find another scraper to scrape the mud off the first scraper!

And that’s what you need to know about our crawl space!

-Bruce Jacobs

May 10, 2021