An exploding toilet? Roaring drain? No big deal

The shriek came from the far back part of the building Monday morning.

“I don’t know what’s happening!” Annette screamed as she ran from the restroom at the back end of the Chronicle building with a look of terror on her face.

We quickly saw what was happening. The toilet was a boiling geyser, spewing fetid water all over the restroom. The sewer drain in the floor was roaring. And I mean roaring: “Braaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Like a Yellowstone thermal vent.

What the heck?

Colleague Kyler remarked that some guys were working in the street down the alley. “Ah ha!,” I thought. That must be it.

I strolled down the alley, where, sure enough, a pair of Town of Lovell public works crew members were working with the town sewer jet. I told them what happened, and they said they were performing routine maintenance of the sewer lines. 

“Don’t you have a backflow preventer?” Chris Bryson asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” I said. “The restroom isn’t that old. It was new just a few years ago. If it was needed, surely such a device would have been installed. But maybe the plumber figured it wasn’t needed. Who knows?”

“Did this happen two years ago, the last time we did this?” Chris asked.

“No, it didn’t,” I said.

“Well, everything should be good now,” he said. “We’re done here.”

Well, “good” is in the eye of the beholder. Our restroom was covered by stinky water and little particles of you know what – the floor, toilet, sink, walls, wastebasket – everything. Fortunately, it wasn’t deep, a light coat, maybe a millimeter of water on the floor. We’ve heard stories of far, far worse.

Annette made sure to point out that she didn’t, um, do anything that would have caused the issue. And everyone else said the same thing. Of course, I thought, THAT wouldn’t have been the cause of such an explosion in any event.

We thought about it and decided that perhaps we do have a backflow preventer, but it was simply a matter of bad timing, that the instant our toilet was flushed, the sewer jet pressure hit our location. Or maybe we don’t have one, but this time the volume of the sewer jet water and the jet pressure was greater. Who knows? We’re not blaming the Town, hoping it’s a one-time thing.

We’ve had some weird things happen with this old building – water running down the walls during a rainstorm before we fixed the roof, a leaky front door, water running in the back door, teenagers tromping across the roof during the night, the previous internal sewer line breaking and collapsing, an ancient swamp cooler that barely lowered the temperature at all and giant icicles forming off the roof in back of the building. 

But this takes the cake. Though the time an employee brought a sick goat into the building during work might be a close second.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a very big deal. We cleaned up the restroom in a jiffy. The toilet works fine. And now we can laugh about it, joking that we’ve never seen Annette move that fast, horrified by what she was experiencing as she simply washed her hands.

 Someday I’m going to write a book.