WyBlog

Weekend from Hell, the busted sewer pipe edition

This was supposed to be the Perfect Weekend. Caldwell Beautification Day on Saturday morning, our annual Cedars Block Party in the afternoon, and a nice relaxing Sunday watching football.

And it was all going great until I went down into my basement to retrieve another bag of ice from the freezer. I got to the bottom step, put my foot down, and felt squish as gooey brown stuff oozed up between my toes. Uh oh.

Yeah, disgusting doesn't quite convey the magnitude of my revulsion. Then I turned around, and water was pouring out of the ceiling from underneath the bathroom toilet. Things sorta went downhill from there.

I turned off the water, got myself somewhat cleaned up, and assessed the damage. People had been traipsing in and out all day long to use the bathroom; the block party attracts a crowd of about 200, and it's always held in the street right in front of my house.

First step, try a plunger on the toilet because maybe it's just clogged. Nope, water ain't going anywhere, and there's way too much yucky stuff in the basement to have come from one overflowed flush. So I grab a flashlight, move some soggy boxes, and yup there's a 10 inch gaping hole in the top of the main sewer pipe. That's the source of the ooze alright.

It's time to call Roto-Rooter! Amazingly they sent a guy within half an hour, on a Saturday night. He lugs a big honking machine into the basement, opens the cleanout expecting to see it full of sludge, but it's bone dry.

Huh? The hole in my pipe is still oozing God-knows-what but the line to the street is clear? The clog must be inside the house, right? Not by him! So he does his thing anyway, finds a few tree roots, and then announces that 80 feet down the line it's blocked by a "wall of mud", and by the way your old clay pipe is in iminent danger of collapse.

But don't worry! He can repair the whole thing, good as new, for the low, low price of $15,000! When should we start? Is tomorrow morning OK?

All the blood rushes out of my head. Remember, it's 11 o'clock at night and I've been fully engaged in the block party for hours. I'd lost count of how much beer I drank, but I'm sure it was a lot. And remember, he still hadn't solved my immediate problem which was the clog inside the house and the pipe with a gaping hole in the top. But not to worry, he could send someone out in the morning to handle that, for "around" $2500. In the meantime, don't run your water or flush a toilet.

Fortunately my wife, who wasn't nearly as blotto as I was, had the presence of mind to call a friend of ours who is a plumber while I was being hustled by the Roto-Rooter dude. Our friend who was thankfully still awake said "sit tight, don't make any decisons, and let me look at it first." Decisions? My head was spinning.

So I grabbed the Roto-Rooter guy and said I needed to clear my head. I've been drinking all day, it's late, this is a lot to digest, let me sleep on it and we'll talk in the morning. He's like, well maybe we can shave some bucks off the price, you really need to get this done, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I finally convince him we won't be signing anything tonight and he promises to come back on Sunday.

Our neighbor offered to let us use her bathroom (thanks!) and I guess I got a little sleep. Let me tell you, we were freaking out.

Sunday morning we stagger across the street to the neighbor's house for coffee and a bathroom break. And then another Roto-Rooter dude shows up. He's here to fix the broken pipe in the basement. OK, how much? He doesn't know! He's just the worker, his "manager" will come by later with a contract.

So let me get this straight. I'm supposed to let this guy start hacking away at my plumbing but I don't know how much it's gonna cost? As much as I'd like to get the problem fixed asap, I'm not that stupid. And besides our plumber friend is on the way over.

Reluctantly I send this guy away, saying "let's wait for the manager". And he says he needs yet another guy anyway, the guy with a "jet truck". Oh, yeah. I seem to remember the dude from last night saying something about that. The jet truck will (maybe) clear out that "wall of mud" at the bottom of my sewer line.

Wait a sec, we have a friend who does that! Why don't we call him! And it was Foley Wash to the rescue! He came right over, fed his high-pressure steam jet down the sewer pipe, ran his hose out to 100 feet, and said to me, "Dude, your sewer line is clear, I couldn't find any blockage." He then ran a garden hose into the line for about 15 minutes, nothing came back up.

The problem was inside the house all along!

Our plumber friend arrived a few minutes later and confirmed that.

He made a quick trip to Home Depot, cut out the broken section of pipe, replaced it with a nice new length of PVC, and we were back in business.

The original pipe in the basement was 103 years old. It had sagged, and waste settled in the middle. Under normal use it had enough clearance to let the water through, but all those people using our bathroom during the block party overloaded its limited capacity. The sagging pipe was weak at its lowest point, the water pressure broke through the top, and thus sewage started flowing out onto the floor.

The Shop Vac is a wonderful invention. The cleanup is going to be messy, and we have to throw a bunch of stuff out, but after a harrowing 24 hours life is slowly returning back to normal.

And the Jets beat Miami last night, so that put me into a pretty good mood, too.

Oh, and we're still waiting for the Roto-Rooter manager guy to show up. I wonder what he'll say if he does?

Thank God for friends.

Posted at 10:28 by Chris Wysocki   [/misc]   Comments | Archived | Perm Link |   |   Tweet