Police Officer Preparation & Law Enforcement Resource - Archive

The remnants of TS Lee have made my lifequite difficult this past week. We got over 10 inches of rain since Sunday. My house has never had anything but the tiniest of water leaks in the 20+ yrs that we have lived here.

I live on the top of a hill and have all of my downspouts buried into 4 inch PVC which drains out behind my property. Wed afternoon my wife calls and says " we have water coming in! ". I left work early to get home and find that we had sewage backing up into the house. Wonderful.

I parked the Civic and took the big SUV down to a Industrial Supply company where I bought 2 small parts washer pumps capable of 200 gph. I got them home , hooked up some garden hoses and was able to keep ahead of the nastiness.

It seems with all of the rain getting into the sewer system, it caused great pressure which actually forced sewage BACK into our house. Fortunately , it was confined to a floor drain in my concrete floored utility room and my shower stall. Using buckets and the pumps , NONE got into the finished part of my basement and I pumped it all way out behind my house with 100 ft of hose.

But , I was up most of last night because the rain kept coming. We didn't even use our toilets/ dishwasher/ shower etc. It still came in with force. After this morning , it stopped and backed down.

Many people in my area had basements full of water/ sewage etc. I consider myself quite fortunate and later today we did get quick showers with no problems :)

Google "basement sewer check valve" for some useless after the fact plumbering.

I read a story where a storm flooded a city street. Genius city workers decided to solve it by opening the sewer man hole in the street. Promptly moving the storm water from the street, through the sewer into the local basements.

It would be interesting to see if the reason you had a problem is because someone connected their drainage to the sewer system.

If the city has the rain water going into the sewer system, that's plain stupidity. Here, where we get lotsa rain, the houses have buried PVC that dumps roof water into the street. The street has drainage pipes that are totally separate from the sewer system. The runoff water goes directly into the river and the sewer water goes to a treatment facility. I shudder to think what would happen if they connected it here.....

I don't know much about plumbing, but I read a few years ago that some sewer workers in Portland did something dumb that caused sewer water to back up into peoples' basements. I recall it because the city, in its typical fashion refused to pay for damages.

Glad you were able to tackle it before it did any major damage.