I had a somewhat similar experience that involved an emergency overflow drain. It wasn't that poking a hole fixed the issue, but that the water from above seemed to randomly stop leaking when the outside weather conditions had not changed. It was a mystery until the landlord finally got someone to inspect the problem. It turned out the normal drainage mechanism would become temporarily clogged by random wind events, and then water would build up to a level where it drained through an "emergency" outlet intended to keep the weight of collected water below a certain threshold. It was just a piece of open PVC pipe packed into a brick wall around the affected area. When the normal drain was clogged, it would eventually allow water down onto my unit, but when the normal drain would somehow blow open etc., the water would stop leaking.