Out of a deep sleep, I heard John's muffled voice. Removing one earplug, I heard him say something about Chuck & Ted, keys & water. What keys? Who are Chuck & Ted? Oh! The neighbours! Keys?...why? Obviously something was seriously wrong...but what?

Our neighbours were returning home around midnight and noticed water running down the wall and across the road from under our pool. Climbing up to the pool level, they discovered that the water in the pool was quickly dropping. I rushed downstairs to look for a key to the gate so that Chuck & Ted could climb under the pool and turn off whatever required turning off.

Unfortunately, there was no key! The only answer was to call Nestor and get him out of bed.

Earlier that evening, around 5pm, Nestor had appeared to announce that the gas(propane) would be turned off for about 15 minutes. In my experience a Mexican 15 minutes is the equivalent of a Canadian 2 hours. Apparently a worker was finally installing the pool heater. Sure enough, two hours later, Nestor cheerfully informed us that the pool heater was installed, the gas was reconnected and I could put dinner in the oven!

While we waited for Nestor to arrive after midnight, I remembered the black smoke and burning rubber that I had smelled around 9:30pm. Was it possible that the new pool heater had suffered a malfunction, overheated, blown a seal?

Chuck & Ted joined Nestor under the pool for an investigation. They managed to halt the flow of water and reported that the heater was definitely burnt and partially melted. How fortunate that they arrived home when they did. Otherwise the pool would have emptied onto the roadway by morning and caused expensive damage to the pump system. Whew! At 1:30am, I replaced my earplugs and tried to get back to sleep.