The Creature from the Black Lagoon (or, our sewer pipe leak)

[Mike Blakesley]

Well, the "dark side" of show business reared its ugly head for us this weekend.

Several months ago we had a toilet clog up. Our local plumber didn't have a "snake" long enough to reach it, so we brought in a plumber from out of town, who fixed the problem. That was in February.

Fast forward to last week. My wife said the auditorium smelled "musty," so I immediately thought we had water in the basement under the stage. It wouldn't be the first time that happened -- when we get a lot of rain, we have a high water table around here and basements can get water in them. I checked, and sure enough, there was about 2 inches of water down there. I hooked up this little pump we have and pumped it out. Figured by the next morning the rest would have evaporated....but nope, the water had come back up, not as high as before but still about an inch or so.

So now I was thinking maybe we had a water leak in our heating system, which is in that basement, because the water coming out of my little pump was nice and clear-looking. I had a local HVAC guy come in and take a look at it, and he not only didn't find any leaks, he said "This smells more sewery than anything." I didn't think it smelled like sewer; or if it did, it was not very "bad" smelling at all. To me it just smelled like mud and dirt. So we went further back into this unused area of the basement where the swamp cooler used to be, and.... found that the main sewer pipe had come unhooked from the connection to the city's system in the alley. The alley pipe had more or less disintegrated; I'm sure it was the original pipe in the building.

We are thinking, but can't prove it, that the plumbing company who fixed the clogged toilet might have damaged that old pipe, which is very brittle, with their long snake. So for several months we've had a river of sludge pouring into that unused room of the basement. (To be fair, it may have come apart later, too.) Why it doesn't stink to high heaven is a minor miracle. I don't understand that at all. What makes it worse is, we have about 150 old theater seats in pieces laying in that room that we had no way to get rid of about 25 years ago... and the river of crap has permeated all of those old seat parts -- cushions, backs, etc. In the corner where the pipe is, it's literally about 2 or 3 inches deep in congealed turds and toilet paper. It is the worst mess I've seen in 50 years in the business.

So, today we called a disaster recovery company and our local plumber, who came in and did a fix on the leaking pipe -- so now the problem isn't getting any worse at least. The disaster people are supposed to be here Monday to pump out the sludge and I'm going to get them to haul out all the old theater seat parts too.

Ah, the glitz and glamor of showbiz. Can't beat it.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Earlier this year our smaller theatre had a water main break at the corner of the property below the street, the pressure found weaknesses in the concrete wall at various plumbing and electrical pass thrus of the basement wall of the hotel next door (which is also our offstage offices, greenroom, dressing rooms etc etc). It flooded for 2 hours at a rate of 300gal a minute before the city was able to turn off the block. It found all the low spots, elevator shafts filled, and the bottom 3 rows of the auditorium partially submerged. But it wasn't just the water... it was the fine silt the water carried in that was the real mess after.

The mitigation crews ripped out the bottom 3 feet of all the sheetrock in the entire basement... which had just been finished and opened less than a year prior. Us technicians ripped out and replaced the entire stage deck and a bunch of the supporting frame over the course of a week. Miraculously we re-opened in about 2 weeks, didn't even have to replace a chair cushion.

Acting fast seems to be the name of the game in these emergencies. Don't let the mold get a foothold.

Last time that building flooded under different management it closed for YEARS, our org was the one that revived it eventually.

[Mike Blakesley]

Acting fast seems to be the name of the game in these emergencies. Don't let the mold get a foothold.

Yeah, that's my big worry. At least this area is well separated (by concrete walls) from the rest of the building, so there's that. I'll know more by this time tomorrow.

[Frank Cox]

This would be a good opportunity to install a backwater valve and a cleanout plug near the connection between your sewer pipe and the city sewer line.

[Mike Blakesley]

That's exactly what we did, as a matter of fact. It's already looking better down there.

[Tj Hopland]

I thought the big time drain people had cameras and that was just part of the process these days? They send the camera down to see what they are or were dealing with like tree roots is a common thing with residential systems. If the cleaning was what took it out the camera should have shown that. Both the snake and camera have footage markings so if they saw the clog before they know about how far the snake should go before it hits it and if they know how far the snake was they know how far to send the camera to make sure they got it all and that there isn't something like roots (or missing pipe) that is going to cause more issues.

[Mike Blakesley]

They had a few issues, I remember that. Partly, it was the fact that it was over 100 feet from the toilet to where the clog was, plus there is apparently a bend in the pipe before it gets to the main sewer line. (I don't know exactly what's down there, considering I was 26 years away from being born when the whole thing was built.)

Anyway, the basement is all cleaned out now -- they finished yesterday afternoon and left 13 fans, two dehumdifiers, and a couple of ultraviolet sanitation devices down there. They hauled all of the old seat parts (and our old Christie console that was in the way of the doorway) to the dump. There are extension cords all over creation to plug everything in and it's quite the vortex down there. Once they get all their stuff out, the next step is to get the city people to look at the sewer line and decide if it needs to be replaced or not. Thanks to our new cleanout, they should be able to get in there easily and take a look.

Then I (and the insurance company) get to start writing checks, I guess.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I grew up in a house where there was a good sized hill that the City sewer had to run uphill in order to drain. Every once in a blue moon, that main sewer clogged, mostly from leaves. Of course it backed up into our basement and the house next door to us as we were at the bottom of that hill. The city even lowered that entire sewer run going up the hill in order to alleviate the problem, but that didn't help because it was a tall hill and they couldn't get it down low enough so it was all level. It was not until about 8 years later that someone from the city had a brain storm to connect the sewer line on our street at the other end to the one in the cross street that it all stopped... The basement never backed up again... Of course, this was all back in the 1960's.