Sewer Problems, City Ordinances, and REALLY deep holes! Part 1

A few weeks ago someone from the city stopped by our house to inform us that they thought our sewer was connected to the storm drain in the area. Turns out they were right....

(that's the sewer in the middle of the road....our house somehow isn't hooked up to it.)

Now, when your home is built over 18 years ago, it's kind of hard to find the blue prints (Hint: They don't exist) and when your house gets connected to the wrong pipe, it's even harder to figure out where the sewer on the house meets the pipe that goes out to the road because the line it's hooked up to doesn't have a "clean out" on it. Go figure!

So, seeing as the city didn't want our "poop" going down the storm drain (and turns out neither did the county), we had to figure out where it was all connected and then figure out who gets to fix it!

How do you do this if you don't have blue prints? Why you get to hire some nice folks to come out with a really cool camera hooked to a long, long piece of wire/pipe like thing and they put it through your pipes and spray paint your lawn and street with where the pipes are!

(we had to take our toilet out in the bathroom and they stuck their camera down the hole...yes..eww, gross--But the camera was wayy cool!)

This is what the camera saw...

That would be the end of our "sewer" line out in our front yard dumping into the storm drain...not exactly where it's supposed to go.

So, they stuck the camera down the sewer lateral clean-out in our front yard (fancy word for "sewer pipe") that had never been hooked up to the sewer (stupid builders!) and lo and behold, out in the street look what it found?

The camera went through the pipe just fine until it got out in the street by our mail box and found a big, gaping hole. Turns out the "real" sewer line wasn't even hooked up! There was a piece of pipe missing (and a big cavern where the pipe should be). You can see the other piece of pipe in the shot above. This is the shot coming out of the pipe in the lawn.

So, out came the spray paint....

See that mark by the curb? That would be where the pipe is missing!

Here's a diagram of it... See the missing pipe?

Next came the fight with the city on who would fix the broken pipe. Thanks to my savvy brother-in-law lawyer who specializes in this sort of stuff, we got the city to fix the problem in the road.

Enter lots of big city trucks and big holes!

This is the truck that came to dig the hole

And that's the hole they started to dig.

 They dug it with a high pressure water thingy and a big vacuum. Quite impressive!

It got really deep! That pipe you see is our water main. The missing pipe was another 3-4 feet down!

So, they dug down to it, muttered a few "What in the world? I've never seen this before!", and fixed the pipe and filled in the hole.

 This is the finished hole. All fixed and ready to be re-paved.

The next day this showed up!

And, along with fixing our mess, they went about fixing potholes in the road as well.

I'd say they did a pretty good job!

So, now we have a sewer line all the way from the house to the road that's actually complete...but not hooked up to the house yet! That'll be part 2! You see, we get to dig an even DEEPER hole in our front lawn (7 feet to be exact) and unhook the pipe from the storm drain and hook it over to the newly fixed sewer line!

Have you ever heard the phrase..."A house is nothing more than a big hole in the ground that you throw money into!"?...well, we're living it! And it won't get us a single benefit! (well, except that now our poop ends up in the sewer instead of the storm drain...but hey, the storm drain worked perfectly well for 18 years. For some reason the city & the county didn't like it that way though....I sure wish the inspector for the city that "supposedly" inspected the sewer & land drain lines when the house was built  & said it was hooked up right was still around though! I'd love to give him a word or two!

Stay tuned for more big holes! They're coming soon to our front lawn!