We are in the middle of a record breaking deep freeze. We woke up to the coldest February 24th on record. At 5 a.m. this morning the temperature had dropped to minus 24.5. That shatters the previous record of minus 20.9 set in 1989. The big problem right now is frozen pipes. Crews are keeping busy with hundreds of calls from all over our region.  For those without water, help isn't coming fast enough.

There is one good thing about all that snow that we've had over the last few days.  With a little ingenuity    and a lot of work, the snow turns into a source of water.  It is a tedious task, but a necessary one if Susanne Liou wants to use her toilet.

‘I don't have water in the house,’ says Liou, as she pours a bucket of melted snow into her toilet tank, ‘so I can't flush it. So in order to flush it, I need to fill the tank.’

Liou has been without water in her east end townhome since Friday.  A city crew managed to make it out Sunday but the first fix didn't work.  Now she's waiting for a second crew to zap the pipe with a current of electricity.

‘I keep calling the city twice a day, and they say they might be able to come tonight or first thing tomorrow.’’

That's what city workers are doing on Ruskin Ottawa in Ottawa’s Civic Hospital area, using an electrical current to try to unblock a frozen pipe.

At the University of Ottawa, student Mariane Lemire tweeted out a video, with the caption "it's raining in class".  A frozen pipe in a heat pump led to a leak in the Montpetit Hall, which the university says was quickly cleaned up.  It did not lead to any cancellations of classes. 

This has been a particularly cold winter and the effects are being felt throughout our region.  In Ottawa, city crews are working around the clock just to respond to calls from people with frozen pipes.

‘Just since Sunday, we had seventy-five calls alone,’ says Dixon Weir, the general manager of Environmental Services with the City of Ottawa, ‘and people are calling in. It is creating a backlog and a lot of stress on our workload.’

Residents in Ottawa are not the only ones having problems.  Petawawa has asked homeowners to run a cold water tap.  They may have to do that for six weeks.  And Brockville has 50 calls in right now for service; the frost line there runs five feet down. Scores of municipalities have issued advisories, from southern to eastern Ontario and into Quebec.

The city of Ottawa is asking those residents who received a notice earlier this winter about running their taps to follow those directions in order to ensure their water service is continuous. The recommendation is to let a slow trickle flow, about the diameter of a straw, until mid-April.  The notices were sent to approximately two thousand homeowners in Ottawa.