Soon after Sarah’s folks arrived for their most recent visit, our downstairs toilet started to behave rather strangely. It was behaving as if it was blocked: when flushed, the water would rise towards the top of the bowl and it would take a long time to sink again.
By the late evening, however, the problem appeared to have remedied itself. The toilet would flush almost normally again. The next morning, too, the toilet was still behaving well, but in the course of the day, it would slowly start to show signs of being blocked again.
As the days went by, the problems continued. I hoped they would disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared, but it wasn’t to be. The symptoms started to become more severe. I’d hear the pump in the cupboard under the stairs grinding away, trying to move water around, but unable to. The same cupboard, which also happens to house much of my computer equipment, started to emit the perspicuous odour of foetid shit. My imagination started to run riot.
Meanwhile, the upstairs toilets continued to flush apparently normally. Even the one in the cellar continued to work normally, but I believe that one follows a separate pipe to the street.
By the end of the bank holiday weekend, it was evident that the problem wasn’t going to fix itself, so I brought a plumber in. After tracing a few pipes and listening to my description of the symptoms, he advised me that there was a strong likelihood the source of the problem was located outside the house.
Once he’d left, I called the local water board and asked for a technician to come and investigate the problem. They agreed to send someone as soon as possible and, sure enough, a couple of hours later, a couple of blokes dressed in orange overalls turned up at the front door. I was impressed with the quick response.
Within minutes, they’d opened up the manhole in the street and were studying their drawings to see which pipe led to which neighbouring house. I went outside to talk to them. They quickly made an interesting discovery: none of the pipes in the manhole appeared to be coming from our house.
A few weeks ago, the pavement right outside our neighbour’s house had been dug up by the water board, apparently to lay new pipes. The suspicion of the men investigating our problem was that one of our pipes had then been mistaken for the neighbour’s, and that it had been erroneously curtailed.
The net result of this was that we were apparently no longer connected to the sewage system! A full camera investigation of the sewer failed to locate a pipe leading from our house.
The theory certainly concurred with the symptoms. If our cut-off pipe now led straight into the subterranean sand and we were truly flushing our toilets, baths and showers straight into that, the liquid would take a long while to seep into the ground. That would explain why, late at night and first thing in the morning, the toilet would appear to flush normally again, as the path along our pipe would have had a chance to clear. Over time, though, it was clearing less and less well, as toilet paper and other, er, crap, collected at the pipe’s base.
In the course of a day, the higher water usage during daylight hours would fill the pipe more quickly than the water could disperse and the symptoms would reappear. Sinks and toilets would glug, flushing the toilet would fill the bowl, the sound of the cellar pump grinding away at seemingly arbitrary moments could be heard, etc.
The fact that it had taken several weeks since the work on the neighbour’s pipes before we had encountered any problems also made sense to the men in orange. They said that it would take a few weeks for the blockage to build up to the point that we would start to suffer its ill effects.
The men with strong accents made some phone calls and informed me that a team of workers would be back in the morning to dig up the street, find the cause of the problem and fix it.
I arranged with them that I would park my car across the relevant area of the street that evening to reserve it for their use the next day. That way, we could avoid having to have the council place signs announcing the work several days in advance, which is the way things usually work here.
True to their word, a team of men turned up with heavy equipment the very next day, just after eight o’clock. Within no time, a large amount of street and pavement had been dug up and the source of the problem located.
Since the street was now wide open anyway, the water board made use of the opportunity to remove the old, porous clay pipes and replace them with shiny new PVC pipes. We were now better off than before the emergence of our problem.
Just over three hours after they had first shown up and started digging, the hard-working fluorescent men were finished and shovelling the last of the sand back into the trenches. A van from the council was standing by to replace the cobblestones once the water board left.
I took photos of the whole event, because I couldn’t believe how quickly so much manpower and material had been mobilised to fix a problem — albeit a serious one — for a single household. Of course, they were only fixing their own mistake, but I was still very impressed with the response. It must have cost several thousand euros to do the work, which had also been given priority over whatever else the team in question had been scheduled to do that day.
Petje af, Waternet!