Effusive effluent: adventures in sewage management (Activity Report)

DURING ONE INTENSE WEEK last month, Fleming and I narrowly managed to avoid two near-catastrophes—namely a flood of sewage in the basement, not only during our main Hanukkah party, but also two days later during the big Hanukkah Happy Hour & Young Professionals Mingle. 

On 12/11, a normally empty 600-gallon sewage pit
in the basement was found to be nearly full.

If things had gone just a little differently, the results would not have been pretty! 😬 Below the jump, I outline the harrowing story, day by day.…

On December 6, some people attending the Kiddush lunch noticed what Fleming later described as “a large scent of sewage” coming from the Sump Pump Room. (So labeled in the 2003 Historic Structure Report.) They alerted him. 

On December 7, i.e., after Shabbat, Fleming asked me what I knew about the plumbing configuration in that room. I said that the room had a sewage pit that had been inactive for years, and previously it seemed mostly empty except for a bit of liquid that I had spotted several feet below the floor level. (I had never shone a flashlight into the dark pit, so I didn’t know exactly how it was constructed.)

Obviously something now wasn’t right. Yet we did not yet grasp what might be going on to cause the foul odor there. Puzzled, we were unsure how to proceed.

On December 11, while Fleming and I were both in that corner room for another reason, so I impulsively pulled up the pit’s hatch cover, to show him what was beneath it. (See photo above.) I was surprised to find that the pit was nearly filled with (smelly) effluent. We did not know what to make of that fact, so I closed the cover and we went about our business. 🫣

On December 12, I awoke with a sense of foreboding. For some reason, that sewage pit had recently started filling up with effluent, I realized. And if it was being fed from toilets and sinks in the sanctuary building (which seemed likely), then the upcoming Hanukkah party—slated to take place just 2 days later on Sunday—might very well cause the pit to overflow and flood the nearby rooms with raw sewage. And that, in turn, might ruin the party—to say the least.

When I alerted Fleming to this dire prospect, he immediately grasped the threat and sprang into action. He quickly found a specialty sewage pumping service that came the same day (Friday); it drained and rinsed out the pit. That task required a 100-foot line out to the truck on Main Street.

On December 13 in the afternoon, I peeked into the pit and saw that it was indeed empty except for a small amount of liquid trickling across its bottom. I breathed a sigh of relief.

On December 14, the party took place without incident. However, these images taken just beforehand show that the pit was already starting to fill up again.

Effluent was entering from the pipe opening at the left
(toward the restrooms and kitchen),
and perhaps from other inlets.

On December 15, I checked the pit again and found that it was nearly full again (!). The liquid level was only roughly 1 foot below the floor, as it had been 4 days earlier. 

Fleming and I immediately asked the office staff and preschool to stop using all sinks and toilets in the sanctuary building. As hoped, the level in the pit stopped rising. 

Meanwhile, I consulted remotely with a plumber (Juan Padilla). Together we tried to make sense of the building’s configuration of pipes and equipment. We pondered the mysteries: How did effluent normally get to the city sewer? Why wasn’t it going that way now? Why was it being channeled into the pit? Was there a way it could exit from there? What needed to be done? We were stumped.

On December 16, in the morning, Ruben alerted the plumber to the existence of a clean-out in the women’s restroom that was adjacent to the room with the pit. 

Suddenly the plumber knew what to do. He promptly arranged for a crew to arrive in the early afternoon, to run a mechanical snake through that opening, intending to clear out the sewage lateral drain line to the city main. 

The crew found the culprit: tree roots were blocking the lateral drain pipe about 30 feet downstream. (Presumably they belonged to the shade tree on Main Street, whose trunk is about 15 ft away from the pit.) They yanked out enough of those encroaching roots to reopen the line temporarily. 

Suddenly the pit started to drain. Its level dropped to that of its inlet pipe, which evidently was functioning in reverse as an outlet. Then it remained at that level, roughly 75% full. 

The plumber and Ruben went to flush toilets to see what would happen. No effluent entered the pit. Apparently it was going straight to the sewer again, as designed. We realized that the pit was no longer in immediate danger of filling to overflowing. 

Suddenly it was possible for the sanctuary building’s toilets and sinks to be used again—and just in time. For only then did I learn that there was a big social event scheduled for that evening, to be held upstairs. 

(Since then, the liquid level in the pit has not increased. To control its odor, I poured in a quart of bacteria-powered drain care liquid. Within a week, the odor indeed seemed to go away.)

Fleming and I realized that we now had a month or so until the roots would grow back inside the drain pipe. Hopefully that would give us enough time to arrange for a more thorough inspection and reaming out of the tree roots in the lateral, and for developing a longer-term remedy for those roots—while also arranging to get the pit cleaned out again. All without needing to rush. The crisis was over.