There Was and Incident This Weekend

Well we had our first major disaster happen over the weekend. We were doing some drywall work in the kitched and needed to move an outlet. Trish went down into the basement to turn the breaker off and she hollered at me to come downstairs. She thought that the basement was leaking. Well not exactly. What had happened was worse. Much much worse.

Our sewer line was clogged and backing up into our basement. The spot above is where the drain is for the basement. I will spare you people the much more gruesome photos. There was a poo pond about 10 feet in diameter emnating from the center of the drain. This was Sunday evening.

Our next door neighbor owns a sewer cleaning service and he was home spending some time working on his yard and playing with his kids. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin this guy's idyllic Sunday afternonon and have come over and wade through our poo pond.

So I call him Monday morning to come over instead, not realizing that the guy works a 12 hour 6pm to 6am at one of the local factories as well. So the guy came over Monday morning after getting an hours worth of sleep or so to auger out sewer. The first run pulled a sizeable pile of roots and we assumed that was the major problem. After several more runs of the auger and some more piles of roots the drain had still not gone down. In the picture below you can see some remnants of the roots in the plastic bag. Our neighbor (Kent) tried a couple of other tricks of the trade to no avail. So Kent calls someone with the city to see if that maybe there is a problem with the main. The city says that there is no problem that they are aware of. This is three hours later and I need to get back to work. So I leave it in Trish's capable hands.

Kent tries a couple of different ends for the auger and eventually gets the poo pond to drain. This leaves a dry pipe that will allow the poo cam to see what the issue really is. So after some nasty TV watching on Kent's poo cam (I'm kind of sorry that I missed that part) they determine that the problem lies in the last bit of pipe to the city main. This means that it is the responsibility of the City and not us. Kent goes home and gets some sleep and the City prepares to dig up the last 12 feet of pipe.

To be continued...