sewage and cold
So this past saturday, my brother texts me at 6:30am:
“Hey dude, the boiler room is flooded with sewage”
There was a blockage somewhere in our sewer line, and the results manifested themselves in the form of a 1” layer of poop and toilet paper stew on our boiler room floor. His bathroom (he lives in the renovated basement directly below, on the same level as the boiler) was an ecological disaster area; a flush of the toilet resulted in a mini shit-fountain from the shower drain that sprayed the stuff all over the walls.
I have a handyman that I usually call, but I’ve relied on him quite a bit and I really enjoy his work a bit too much to subject him to a literal shitstorm on a Saturday morning. so I decided to call Roto-Rooter, thinking that they’re usually the best folks to deal with this exact case.
The dispatcher we got from Roto-Rooter’s 800 number told us that they’d be here sometime between 8am and 10am. My experiences of being on-call as a Sysadmin has tempered by expectations of others in times of crisis, and that seemed like a reasonable timeframe for a guy to get in a truck and load it up with various plumbing equipment, and given our desperate situation, we made no complaints about this schedule.
So, in the quality alone time we had on our hands with our predicament, we tried things. We searched around for a way into the sewer, and found a hole in my garage. I logically concluded that we could probably clear the obstruction somewhere between the bathroom and the street. If this was stuck toilet paper or grease, a kettle of boiling water followed by a blast from a garden hose usually did the trick for me in the past.
Naturally, the screw securing the pvc grate to the hole was rusted and worn, so I grabbed a chiseled hammer and broke it open. I poured three kettles of boiling hot water down the drain, leaving an impressive cloud of water vapor and a satisfying local gurgling sound down that 4 foot pipe that I imagine led to the obstruction somewhere down the street. I then followed up with about a ten minute blasting from a garden hose.
In hindsight, these are acts of a desperate amateur. A garden hose can be really handy, but it really does not have enough output to dislodge a significant amount of impacted matter. Pouring hot water down a pipe is risky, because there’s always that off chance you’d crack something from the sudden heat expansion. Lastly, what is usually ultimately needed is direct, physical removal of the obstruction, and this most always means a plumber with a powered auger (drill), lovingly dubbed by the general public as a plumber’s snake. I knew this, I did not have a power nor even a hand-cranked snake in my house, but in time I will know that it wouldn’t have mattered.
More importantly, my desperate acts worked, to the extent that the shit fountains were defeated - I had partially cleared the obstruction and bought us some valuable time. This would prove to save us.
We followed up this effort with an initial mopping. The crapstorm left a gradient of brown in the boiler room which thankfully started off a light coffee near the entrance. My brother is quite abit weaker-willed in these matters, so it was up to me to mop this up, again thankfully with one of these, so direct contact was minimal, but it was a slow-going process nonetheless:
I soaked up about two 8-gallon buckets full of this shitjuice and dumped it into the sewer grate out on our street. A lot of work for not too much result, but it was more manageable - we weren’t going to get our sneakers saturated with digested lunch.
8am passed. For my brother, being an unemployed, OCD night-owl who has yet to kick his post-college sleep schedule, it was time for bed. He decided to catch a few winks before the plumber showed up. I was going to stay up and wait for the guy to come and save our asses. I went upstairs and googled for sewage-clearing solutions, watched some how-to videos on youtube, and brainstormed some ideas for a better way - motorized mini-drills fed by power over ethernet and a waterproof head unit controlled by an arduino with a usb cam…
Folks who’ve lived through this kind of thing will tell you - the hardest part about living with any situation like this in home ownership is not so much the work involved. The work ends up being a sort of therapy - be it administrative work of coordinating a task force, moving aside furniture, mopping and later shoveling fecal matter from the floor - at the time, this is theraputic because it keeps you from worrying and overthinking. You’re doing something to help the situation, and so you alleviate your feelings of helplessness as the situation becomes more dire. You stop blaming, or imagining all those things could’ve prevented this (proactive monitoring, regular maintainence, dilligent application of some imagined ideal behavior), because true or not, that’s just not important right now. After a certain point, you just have to accept the situation and not let it consume you.
9am. No truck, no doorbell, no salvation. 10am. We called the dispatcher again:
“Sorry sir, the technician will be late. There’s quite abit of traffic… He should arrive at 11am.”
There was still a lot of snow and ice on the driveways around my town from the blizzard the last week, so I was accepting of this reality. But make no mistake - Roto-Rooter is on my shit-list. I was exhausted. I took a nap on my couch, woke up after an unsuccessful attempt, played some Dragon Quest IV on the Wii, and just found ways to get my mind off the situation.
The guy arrives at 3pm. Let’s call him Bill. Bill looks like a plumber’s plumber, an older, stocky gentleman with a reassuring air of mastery and experience. He greets me, “Hello, young man. You ready for this?”
I’ve been cleaning shit all morning. I was beyond “ready” for whatever he was going to do, so I nod. ”Thanks for coming, it must’ve been an adventure for you to get here”. He shrugs and proceeds to takes a look at the boiler, and recoils at the sight. ”MY god, listen, could you hose this down, for your sanity?”, he gasped. I didn’t have any preconceptions about plumbers, and I was quite thankful for his presence despite it all, so I shamefully complied, thinking that I probably screwed up. I didn’t believe that it would be okay to hose down the room since the boilers were in such close proximity. I was afraid I might damage the electrical components, such as the gas or hot water valves that led to the thermostat, and just plain afraid of doing something that might worsen the situation.
“So you’re sure this is okay?”, I asked Bill.
“Yeah, do it”. I got the hose and sprayed, unleashing a beam of clear water and revealing the cesspool in its full glory. The solid wastes swam through the room now, motivated by my hosing and swirling through the room with no destination in particular. I’d successfully diluted the soup, but there was no place for it all to actually go. The drain that this all originally gushed out of was already clogged in the first place. I stopped after about five minutes of hosing. Bill was already working in the next room with his power auger by now. After a few minutes of this, he tells me to flush the toilets upstairs. I comply, and come back to a sad-faced Bill.
“Son, I’ve got bad news. You ready? Your drain is under your boiler. I don’t know what idiot did designed your sewer”, Bill said. All the crap that was in the boiler room was coming from a drain under the boiler, which was why I couldn’t see the crap fountain like I did coming from the shower in the bathroom. This is an important fact: crap had been spewing directly into my heating system’s boiler every time someone flushed the toilet. More importantly, Bill said he couldn’t do anything at this point, because that boiler’s 500 lbs, and he needed to get under it with his auger to clear the obstruction. Since it was the weekend, he “doesn’t pack the camera”. So I had to wait until Monday for them to camera the line and see if he can find “another way in”.
At this point, I’d like to underscore that I don’t really know this stuff very well, but for those who are googling for answers, search for your sewage check valve. Hell, do it now, so you know where it is. Mine was the culprit for all this (a ball of paper towels had prevented the valve from opening), and it was 5 feet away from where Bill was standing as he gave me the bad news, underneath an iron access floor plate.
After making a call to dispatch, trying to get someone else with a camera to my house, it was nearing the end of the day, so he bid me farewell and good luck. It was going to be a long haul until Monday. THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EMERGENCY SERVICE. However, Bill is a licensed master plumber, so I accepted his diagnosis that it is a complex problem, so I accepted my fate.
I downed a few glasses of Shiraz that night and played Dragon Quest IV until I was thoroughly docile and went to bed.
Sunday morning. The heat went out in the middle of the night. I was sure the pilot went out, but it’s pointless (and prohibitively disgusting) to relight. Home Depot trip - picked up a shop-vac, a hand auger, some small plumbing tools. Tried clearing the garage hole again. Nothing of course (since the clog was behind a closed flap). Very tired. The basement reeked of death, but what came out of the boiler drain was now mostly liquid. My initial investment of effort was still paying out in that there were no new occurrences of solid waste, but what was already there was starting to reek. My brother later commented that we were “lucky” this happened in winter, in what was one of the coldest days in recent memory. Sent an email to my boss that I’d be out on Monday to deal with home issues.
Monday. The house is freezing cold. Roto-rooter finally arrives, a younger gentleman, let’s call him Dave, who seemed confused after examining the area. ”Why didn’t you call us earlier?”, he asked. I told Dave what transpired, and he blamed the automated 800 dispatch - my area code’s assigned to a county whose center is much farther away, and I would’ve done better to directly call the office of the county north of me. It had also been a busy weekend. Regardless, he begins the berates Bill, since apparently he’s quick to boast around the office but completely missed the mark here.
In moments, Dave locates where my check valve should be. For some reason, it was entombed under not only the iron sewer plate, but under a thick layer of concrete and bricks. He smashes the loose rock with a crowbar and we manage to hit a flash of white - we’d uncovered the exit point of all the sewage that is generated by my home to the city sewer. After some difficulty (the valve’s bolts had long been rusted out and destroyed) he opens the cap…
WOOSHHHHHHgarglegarglegargle
Raw Sewage rushes past beneath us, the stench wafting through the garage. Dave grimaces, but looks up to me and nods. There is so much that it rises dangerously high inside the pit for a while before it graciously empties out into the sewer. We’re finally free, and it had only taken two hours.
Fuck you, Bill. Thank you so much, Dave.
Dave and I spend the rest of the time talking about incompetent coworkers and absent-minded younger brothers… he takes my card and charges me $321. Small price.
I walk back to the boiler room. It was still a disaster. We spend the next hours shoveling crap, hosing down, shoveling some more, scrubbing, vaccing, disinfecting…
When we were finally somewhat clear, I grabbed the lighter and went to fire the boilers back up. I first noticed a problem when I switched the valve to “pilot” and pressed the red button…
Nothing. No sound, no gas.
I checked the unit for the 2nd floor above us and thankfully heard the familiar hiss of gas. But nothing from the 1st and basement floor unit. I lit the 2nd floor unit, using a mirror to guide my hand, since I wasn’t about to lie down with my cheek on that moments-earlier shit-and-piss stained cement floor. The first floor unit had some problem. I knew that it wasn’t the thermocouple, since that would simply cut off the gas after I released the red button - there was no gas for me to light at all.
We needed more cleaning supplies, so my brother and I headed back to Home Depot, stopping by the local diner to get some food. There, I gave my usual plumbing and heating company a call - I wasn’t going to live through another night without heat - and was told that someone will be there in an hour. After dinner we headed home and within minutes the guy showed up (why didn’t I call them instead of roto-fucking-rooter).
The local plumber arrived at 5:15pm and proceeded to diagnose the unit in a systematic fashion with the most impressive United States Marine Corps.-tempered degree of gusto I’ve ever seen and by 5:45pm ultimately found that the pilot gas head / outlet that meets the thermocouple was clogged with shit. He cleaned the unit and reinstalled it, and I had heat. Cost was $175. Told me that if I had called them on Saturday instead of Roto I’d be a couple hundred less poor and would’ve been done with this issue same day. Dude never complained and was by all means genuinely happy to be there working and paying the bills doing something that most people are grossed out by (he had the corner on this market by being not at all terrified by the prospect of wading in a pool of shit). The man is an inspiration (and I’ve now got their number burned into my brain and associated with awesome).
If I ever complain about my job again, I need to read this post to remind me that things can be so much worse, and the best thing to do in a bad situation is to think positive and rationally.
