<B>Sewer</B>
Sewer Saga
In late March 2002, I took off for three days of research at the Hagley library and archives in Wilmington, Delaware. Instead of driving straight back to Pittsburgh, I stopped for the night at Debbie's apartment in Johnstown.
There was a message on the answering machine from our nextdoor neighbor in Pittsburgh. The sewer had backed up into her basement, the plumbers had had to dig up part of the driveway we shared, and it was possible that the work would affect our gas line, and, well, we'd have to see what else was going on when I got home ...
This is what greeted me when I pulled up to the house next morning. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to stock up on Yuengling and cheap Scotch before leaving for Delaware! We were lucky -- sort of. There was no back up into our basement, and our gas line was fine. But it turned out that the storm drains and waste water lines from our two houses shared the same connecting line to the main sewer. That connector was choked with tree roots, and it had broken in at least two places. The whole thing had to be dug up and replaced. So, our neighbor's problem was also our problem. At the age of 112, our twin houses needed a double bypass!
The original terra cota sewer pipe lay at the bottom of a narrow trench dug through hard shale. Those two small pipes above the sewer line are the original gas lines. Three days of jack hammer work had gotten the work to this point. When work resumed the following Monday things got worse.
Digging under the sidewalk the crew ran into another gas main, a water line, and one or two pipes that they couldn't identify. The maze of pipes made it impossible to use a backhoe. So it was pick and shovel work through shale for several more days until all the bad terra cota pipe was removed.
This shows the new sewer connection about half done. None of this stuff was present in the original line, which probably dated to when the houses were built in 1890. Back then Pittsburgh's sewer system was just getting started, and there was little if any municipal control over how connections were built.
Today, of course, there are a whole bunch of regulations, with doo-doo police to enforce them. One of those regulations says you can't have shared sewer connections. Fortunately, there's a clause that allows for Joint Maintenance Agreements where there are pre-existing shared lines. It took two more weeks of research and a couple trips to the county office building to get all the words right, but we're now off Pittsburgh Water & Sewer's S#@%list (I think they REALLY call it that).
So that's the story of how we got a new driveway (we prefer "carriageway"). It took three weeks and cost $ (mumble, mumble). But at least we're no longer sewer scoff-laws, and we learned that we have very, very, very good homeowners insurance.
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This is what greeted me when I pulled up to the house next morning. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to stock up on Yuengling and cheap Scotch before leaving for Delaware! We were lucky -- sort of. There was no back up into our basement, and our gas line was fine. But it turned out that the storm drains and waste water lines from our two houses shared the same connecting line to the main sewer. That connector was choked with tree roots, and it had broken in at least two places. The whole thing had to be dug up and replaced. So, our neighbor's problem was also our problem. At the age of 112, our twin houses needed a double bypass!
