Literally. Our sewer backed up last night and there have been two guys out there all morning trying to get a rooter past the wye connector where the addition sewer line hooks into the old house sewer line. No dice on the output side; looks like the pipe has collapsed.
The camera guy says that most of the houses in this neighborhood were hooked up to the sanitary with Orangeburg pipe. Yeah. Go google that. The shit is made of compressed tar paper.* I am not certain if ours has clay or Orangeburg, but I’m beginning to think that it’s probably the latter.
I’d sue the son of a bitch who built this house for use of substandard materials if he wasn’t dead 40+ years.
Anyway, the plan at the moment is to dig down to the wye connector and see what’s what, and whether they can just fix that junction or if they need to fix it all the way to the street. Either way, bet it’s going to be ‘spensive. One good thing, they said they’d figure in installing a cleanout right at the wye — which is something I cannot for the life of me figure out why we didn’t do in the first place when we ran the line 25 years ago.
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* Formally known as “bitumenized fiber pipe”. If it were flat I’d call it “shit on a shingle”.