SB 54: February 4, 2003 - Pinhole Leaks
Chuck Dolan, Homeowner, Silver Spring


In late 1996 my wife and I moved into our house in Silver Spring and quickly got to work replacing bathrooms and windows and repainting the interior; by late 1998 we were satisfied with the result of the effort we'd put in. In early 2001 I registered the washingtonareapinholes.com domain name in an effort to regain my sanity after pinhole leaks (starting in 1999) had undone a lot of the nice touches we'd added to the house. That year seemed to be the peak of new pinhole reports and through my website I quickly gathered dozens of stories from people like myself, some of whom had a much rougher time than I did. A number of those homeowners had repiped already. I heard reports about pipe just a few years old succumbing to this new corrosion and I held off replacing my own pipes.

I've learned a lot of things over the last few years. I've learned that an expensive paint job can develop a bubble the size of a fist before the paint gives way and the water streams down the exterior of the wall. I found out where all those razor blades went over the decades of disposal through the slot in the bathroom medicine cabinet - they all wound up on my head as I pulled down the ceiling below the master bathroom trying to get to a pinhole leak below the shower. That same ceiling came down again less than two years later in pursuit of a new leak in a stretch of pipe that hadn't been affected the first time. I've come to appreciate the power of the simple claw hammer, and I've learned to hate the musty smell of wet sheetrock.

I'm looking forward to doing some major renovation over the next year; we've decided to give ourselves a new kitchen as a reward for ripping up the walls to replace the pipes, which I can't trust anymore. I want to know that I can put new pipes back in my walls. The only way I'll feel confident - and I believe I speak for the scores of homeowners who have contacted me through my website and the five thousand others who have reported problems - is by hearing exactly what changed in our water over the course of the 1990s to bring us to this point. We'll only be able to move past this nightmare when we know just what happened and we can be assured that the remedy will prevent this from happening again.

Chuck Dolan
http://www.washingtonareapinholes.com