A Sudden Freeze Caught Newport With Its Pipes Down — and Its Engines Too
The first hard cold of November burst water pipes, temporarily shut the Jurgens mill and damaged gasoline engines at the telephone office and The Miner.
The cold snap of Saturday night and Sunday caught a number of places unprepared for the change in temperature, and was the means of furnishing considerable work for plumbers in the repairing of burst water pipes, etc. At the Jurgens mill the plant had to shut down temporarily for the repairing of pipes. The Newport Telephone Co. and The Miner office had gasoline engines damaged by the bursting of cylinders.
“The cold snap of Saturday night and Sunday caught a number of places unprepared for the change in temperature.”
A hard freeze could still turn a small town’s infrastructure into a repair queue; the 1909 item treats burst pipes and damaged engines as ordinary civic weather. Newport’s dependence on local mills, phone service and a newspaper press made the cold snap a shared disruption.
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