The first sign is usually a sound, not a leak
If you own one of the older homes around Rountree, Delaware Town, or the blocks near downtown Springfield, you probably noticed it before you saw any water. A tick or a knock inside a wall after a hard freeze. A faucet that sputters air before anything comes out. A water heater closet that's suddenly cold to the touch. These houses were built for a mild Ozarks winter, not for the kind of arctic air that drops down from the plains every few years and parks over southwest Missouri for three or four days straight.
That's the pattern here. Springfield doesn't get steady winters like the upper Midwest. It gets long stretches of mild weather broken by sharp, short freezes, often with a quick thaw right behind them. Pipes that would be fine in a place with consistent cold struggle more here because they never get the chance to be properly protected or properly drained. The freeze-thaw cycle itself does damage that a single hard winter somewhere colder wouldn't.
Why the old pipes go first
A lot of Springfield's housing stock dates from the 1920s through the 1960s, with galvanized steel or early copper runs that pass through uninsulated crawl spaces, exterior walls that were never meant to hold modern duct work, and additions bolted onto the original structure with plumbing routed wherever it was easiest at the time. Galvanized pipe corrodes from the inside over decades, narrowing the channel water can move through. When that narrowed pipe freezes, it has almost no room left to expand into, so it cracks instead of just blocking.
Crawl spaces are the other weak point. Many older homes here were built up on a few feet of open crawl space with vents around the foundation that were useful for summer moisture control but turn into a direct path for freezing air in January. If those vents haven't been closed for the season, or the foam covers have crumbled with age, the pipes running through that crawl space are exposed to outdoor temperatures with nothing but a wood subfloor between them and your living room.
More on this from How An Older Springfield House Fails Differently In A Freeze.
What you can check yourself before a freeze hits
Walk your crawl space access and look at the vents. If they're the old flip-style covers, make sure they're actually closed, not just sitting there rusted open. Foam insulation sleeves on exposed pipe are cheap and something most homeowners can install themselves with a utility knife and some tape.
Know where your main shutoff valve is and make sure it still turns. On older homes this is sometimes in an odd spot, a crawl space, a closet, buried behind a water heater that's been added since the valve was installed. Find it now, not during an emergency, and work the handle once or twice so it isn't frozen in place by corrosion when you need it.
During a hard freeze, let faucets farthest from your main line drip slightly, and open cabinet doors under sinks that sit against exterior walls. It's a small thing but it keeps water moving and reduces the sharp temperature swing that cracks a pipe.
Where this stops being a weekend project
If a pipe already froze and you see it bulging, discolored, or hear water running somewhere you can't locate, that's not a wait and see situation. A frozen pipe that has split will often hold until the thaw, then let go all at once, and by then it's not a drip, it's water coming through a ceiling or pooling in a crawl space you can't easily access.
Galvanized pipe especially isn't something to patch yourself. It fails in ways that are hard to see from outside, and a quick fix on one section often just moves the pressure problem to the next weak spot down the line. If your water pressure drops suddenly during or after a freeze, if you find water where there shouldn't be any, or if your main shutoff won't turn when you need it to, that's the point to call someone who can get out quickly, shut things down safely, and figure out what's actually failed rather than guessing at it in the cold.
After the thaw, don't assume you're clear
Springfield's freezes often break fast, a hard cold snap followed by days in the 50s. That thaw is when damage that happened quietly during the freeze shows up. Check your water heater closet, your crawl space, and any exterior-wall cabinets for damp spots or a faint musty smell over the following week. A pipe can crack during the cold and not leak until the ice inside it melts and the water has somewhere to go.
If your house is older and this is the first hard freeze you've gone through in it, it's worth the half hour to look at everything once the weather breaks. Better to find a small drip in the crawl space on a Saturday afternoon than to find out about it from a water stain on the ceiling a month later.