China's Central Heating Has It's Pitfalls...Namely, Flooding

This is a picture of my apartment today taken at around 5pm with visibility that would make an air traffic controller go nuts.  Our home, just like most every Chinese home located north of the Yangtze River, is equipped with radiators hooked up to the city's coal-powered central heating system.  Most of the time this gives us much needed warmth to make it through Xinjiang's bitter cold winters but today we learned that such radiators can also be effectively used to create a sauna in your own home...or a flood.

I can laugh about it right now because - as mean as this sounds - it wasn't our home that flooded!  It was our neighbor's directly across the hall.  As luck would have it this neighbor also happens to be a vice-mayor in our city who is rarely ever at home, so when my wife knocked on their door today after finding water streaming out of their apartment, we weren't surprised that nobody answered.

It's important to note that for some reason the metal door frames in our apartment building come with a two inch lip all around the edge so I estimated that in order for water to be coming out of door it would have to be at least that deep all throughout the house.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.

It was deeper.

Since I'm not in tight enough with the mayor to have his personal cell number it was our landlord who opened the door across the hall and unleashed all chaos.  I'm not kidding either...it was chaos!  Water gushed out of their apartment and carried with it all sorts of fun things.  Trash, boxes, shoes, and (believe it or not!) fruit all tumbled down the stairs toward the basement where all sorts of stored furniture and nick-nacks were just waiting to get ruined.  It may be difficult to see in the picture, but you could have surfed on the water that was speeding down these stairs.

And this is where the steam comes in.  You see, all of this water was made possible by a busted central heating radiator meaning that every ounce of this water was boiling hot!  Immediately once the door was opened all windows, glasses, and camera lenses fogged up, visibility was reduced to arm's-length, and sweat began covering our bodies. We might have reacted differently if it were our home getting more than this steam bath, but as it was we were dying laughing.

Over the next three hours we helped dispose of 13 beds (all in storage), a couple of wooden chairs which were ruined, a load of boxes and bags, and countless gallons of water.  In all, three floors were affected (2nd, 1st, and basement) but only the mayor's valuables were damaged.

So I guess the moral of this story would be to take caution if you have central heating in China.  This isn't the first time I've seen this happen and major damages are avoidable in most cases.  Since most homes in China are tiled you don't have to worry about ruining the carpet, just don't keep valuables on the floor.

And whatever you do, please keep your fruit off the ground.  Those poor oranges never stood a chance.