In the evening hours of a cold night residents of a building in Luzhou heard somebody having a loud karaoke session. A tenant went downstairs to check if it was in the basement, it wasn’t. It was on the second floor, which they went up to in order to check what was going. Upon reaching the floor they were astonished and stood outside of the apartment, some older gentleman was singing nostalgic songs in Taiwanese in the apartment. It was barely eight. Thinking that the music wasn’t much of a disturbance they didn’t think much of it and left it as it was.
Shortly after the administrator of the building sent a representative to go door to door asking if somebody made any changes to the gas pipe work because the whole building didn’t have gas and they suspected a tenant installing a new boiler to be the perpetrator of the whole situation. Most probably somebody must have connected p
ipes incorrectly when they were installing their new boiler. The person behind it has either connected the pipes themselves, hired an unlicensed builder or shady building service to do it for them and they didn’t want to come forward so they could save some “face”, some tenants gathered outside concluded. It was one of the coldest nights of the year and many tenants found themselves without hot water. Later on, building’s administration started a broadcast over the PA asking all tenants not to use gas or water for a while.
The Gas company’s engineers were dispatched to the building and the same door from behind which one could hear loud karaoke earlier on, now was wide open with all the lights off and cold draft was blasting through the desolate space. Feeling of emergency could be felt. Outside engineers were screaming at each other to turn off the gas immediately as it apparently went inside the water pipes and vice versa. A hacked pipe was sticking out from the wall; water was still streaming out of it. Smell of gas was all around and a crowd that gathered looked on in awe.
What transpired later was that the person who caused the entire building not to have gas that night was the very same person who lived in the apartment that hosted a little karaoke showdown earlier on that evening. This is just a speculation but it appeared to a few tenants as if the guy wanted to ‘sing off’ this blunder and forget it while emptying a glass of Kaoliang, or make it look as though he had no idea what was going on because it was so ‘loud’ in his apartment. It was quite a cold night, and plenty of people didn’t have water or gas, right when it snowed in some parts of Taiwan. It wasn’t until 16:00 the next day when the gas was finally turned back on in the entire building, allowing people to have a hot shower and cook normally again.
We are not sure how much the fine for such a blunder is. The gas company jad spent a lot of time repairing this massive mistake, so it’s safe to say someone will be paying for the mishap a hefty fine. However a burning question we have remains, is this even possible, connecting water to gas and gas to water pipes….. is this even possible without some major jerry-rigging ?
Taiwan Observer 
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