[ Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published October 28, 2024] 2024
We have two manhole covers on the street on either side of our house. We have a lot of history with them, none of it good.
One of them tends to flood, as in fill up with water, which is puzzling when it hasn't rained in six months. It's yet more of the poltergeist that afflicts our address, along with our streetlight that doesn't exist, and the fact that our house and the two on either side of it have three different street names. Even GPS can't figure it out.
Alas, one of these manholes, in a design that to we non-technical types defies logic, contains the electrical circuits that power both our home and many of the neighbors. So when the manhole fills up with water, the circuits short out (duh), and a whole bunch of SD G&E trucks show up to pump it out and then re-wire. In the interim, there's no power.
Meanwhile, prior to Proposition 13's passage in 1976, city sewer lines received regular maintenance. But one of the budget cuts that occurred afterwards was that this line item was dropped from the city's budget.
Even we weren't aware of this until the morning of January 7, 1981. It was 7 a.m. and I was still in my nightgown, feeding 10-month-old Henry breakfast. My then-husband was off playing tennis. (Men are never home when you need them.) Rory, aged 3, was feeding Cheerios to the slugs on the patio. (Slugs really like Cheerios.) All of a sudden I felt an earthquake-like rumble followed by geysers of black gunge spewing from all the drains in the house - toilets, sinks, showers, bathtub. They truly could make a horror movie out of this. Under the best of circumstances, I am not a morning person.
I raced outside to turn off the main water supply to the house, but nothing happened. Within minutes, water was several inches up the walls and overflowing the house. When the emergency plumber showed up, the first thing he said was, "I've already called the city. There's nothing I can do."
Through no fault of ours, there had been a trunk line block of the sewer line in front of our house. The force was so great that it had blown the manhole cover part way off. Since we were the last house before the blockage, the entire neighborhood's sewage came up through our house for almost two hours before the city emergency crews could clear it. The sheer force of the water ruptured our plumbing, and the flooding shorted out our telephone and electrical outlets. The city work crews (regular fixtures at our house for many weeks) put all the furniture up on blocks and came in with huge, noisy industrial fans to dry the place out. We all had to get gamma globulin shots against hepatitis. We found toilet paper in colors we never used.
We were not the only people in San Diego to suffer this unfortunate turn of events, and suffice to say, routine sewer maintenance made it back into the budget. This, however, has been a mixed bag.
About six years ago, a neighbor (Neighbor A) developed a serious roach problem. The city had put some irrigation pipes on the set-back on their property which somehow seemed to have created a massive creepy underground colony of roaches who were regularly invading their home. The city finally came out and decided to clear the sewer lines (and hopefully the roaches) by blasting water at very high velocity from the manhole (the one without the electrical circuits) in front of the neighbor (Neighbor B) across the street from us.
It was an epic fail. Fortunately, no one was sitting on a commode in Neighbor B's house when a geyser of high-pressure water blew through their toilets all the way up to the ceiling creating, besides utter life-altering terror in the residents, a giant sewer-eal mess. It would have been the ultimate reverse bidet. The city was very nice about cleaning it all up but we're all pretty wary of those sewer maintenance trucks now.
We, fortunately, had never had any problems with sewage backflows when the sewer maintenance folks come out. Until now. When I saw them show up recently, I immediately texted my neighbors across the street to make sure their toilet seats were down.
But the next morning, we were noticing a really bad smell coming from our guest bathroom, and quickly found the source: The bottom of our shower was filled with what looked (and smelled) like raw sewage. We got the emergency drain cleaner people out but they said the P-trap was totally impacted and we'd need real plumbers to replace it.
Meanwhile, I was noticing on NextDoor that other people were posting frantic messages about similar occurrences. Three such messages:
This morning we awoke to a loud noise and the water in all five of our toilets exploded . Fortunately, it was just clean water, but it was all over the floors and parts of the walls. Did this happen to anyone else?
And: This has happened to us twice when the city has come and cleaned a main drain. They happened to start the work in a manhole near our house so it was possible to figure it out.
And: This happened to us some years ago, but our toilets exploded with sewage, resulting in us having to move out of our house and have the hazmat people come in and clean up the mess [No, this wasn't even us!]
What could possibly be causing water or sewage to be spewing from toilets or drains?
Answer: You are almost certainly closest to the manholes where the crews were working. Your tax dollars at work, folks! (If we ever sell, would we be required to disclose these manhole covers, along with the phantom streetlight and the GPS-inaccessible address?)
As annoying (and expensive) as this all was, compared to the months-long renovation of our home back in January 1981, I'm just happy that they're coming out and maintaining these lines.
But could you maybe tone down the velocity on those hoses just a little?
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