The Plumbing Problem (12/9/00)

If you like those humorous accounts of human success and failure in Reader’s Digest, you may enjoy this.  If not, ignore this!

 

Visitors often ask what we do in our “spare time” as missionaries, since we currently only have clinic two days a week.  I often want to respond tongue-in-cheek, that we lounge on the beach, drinking piña coladas, and work on our tans.  But, since that wouldn’t go over too well with some people, I hold off. So, however, this is an account of how we used some of our “spare time”.

 

At the outset, you have to understand the setting.  My only plumbing experience prior to coming to Honduras was a fiasco.  It occurred during surgical residency when I decided to try and save some money and do a “simple” plumbing job myself.  Not only did we not save money, in addition to paying the plumber, we needed to hire a dry-waller to patch the multiple holes in our living room that failed to reveal the pipes that I knew had to be there!  Enough said.

 

This Honduran plumbing problem actually had its origin last spring.  As we were preparing to leave for three months in The States, our fellow missionaries, the O’Neils, had their septic tank overflow.  Their boys spent a few days sludging out the tank (there is no one to call to pump out your tank down here!).  Pad O’Neil mentioned that I might want to consider doing the same to our tank before we had a problem, since to his memory, the tank had not been cleaned for at least six years.  I filed this item on my “To Do” list, below several more urgent things.  Maybe I would get to it this winter.

 

The day of our departure for The Sates arrived. Leon Greene, a cardiologist, had arrived to run the clinic in our absence, and was staying at our house with his family. Becky was doing the last-minute laundry, a couple of extra loads of linens, to leave everything clean for the Greene’s.  As we were packing the car, the last laundry load hit the rinse cycle on the washing machine, and up through the shower in our bedroom came murky water, quickly spreading into our bedroom.

 

Our departure was delayed slightly while we cleaned up the water, but our plane would not wait.  So, we left the ultimate job in the capable hands of Dr. Greene.  After we left, our gardener, Abdulio, was given the job of excavating the lid, and sludging out the tank.  I can’t say I am really sorry I missed the job, but I did feel bad leaving it with Leon.

 

Pad O’Neil suggested that we bury a 55-gallon drum full of holes in the back yard just outside the laundry room, to receive the wash water from the laundry and thereby decrease the volume flowing into the septic tank.  Did I learn?  No!  I filed this info on my “To Do” list, down the line a bit.  But I did give it some thought and had a plan.

 

This fall, after returning from The States, we had continual visitors.  We noticed that the toilet in the main bath was starting to flush rather sluggishly.  We were even having water back up in the sink at times when we flushed.  I didn’t need to be a plumber to realize that this was a problem, so I put this on my “To Do” list, near the top.  

 

The day before we were to receive houseguests for two weeks, I decided it was time to do some plumbing.  The problem had grown to the point that we were asking everyone who had “solids” to deposit in the toilet, to use the master bathroom in our bedroom.  This was going to be very awkward with a visiting couple, especially at night.

 

Whenever the toilet in the main bathroom was plugged with solids, we could temporarily clear the clog by plunging.  But since the bathroom sink allowed the plunging pressure to escape, one person had to remove the trap and seal the pipe with plastic wrap while the other person plunged.  A real team effort!

 

So, the day before the visitors arrived, I set to work, with many anxious looks from Becky, remembering my prior plumbing experience.  I supposed that trying to run a plumbing snake through a toilet bowl would be awkward, so I decided to run my 30-foot snake (purchased during my residency days and shipped to Honduras with our household goods) through the trap under the sink.  I ran its full length in without trouble, except that now the trap wouldn’t seal well.  No problem!  A small pan under the trap could catch the water, which was only a slow drip anyway!

 

The toilet, however, was no better!

 

Next, I took (for me) the bold step of pulling up the commode, something I had never done before.  I noticed the thick waxy ring and gasket around the opening in the floor, and figured this must be somewhat important.  I could see how it worked (this was not rocket science!).  I also noticed some spaghetti-sized roots floating free in the pipe beneath the opening.  I ran the snake, pulled out a few strands of roots, but nothing more.  I wished I could see down the pipe better, and even gave consideration to using our colonoscope from the hospital.  After all, it had been down several sewer pipes of a sort before!

 

But time was short, so, after carefully reshaping the wax ring that had become flattened and grooved by the snaking effort, I reset the commode.  When I flushed the toilet, water gushed out around it at floor level.  That wax ring was even more important than I first thought!  I pulled the commode again and did my best to reshape the ring.  As I did, I noticed how irregular our floor was around the pipe, and that there was wax both above and below the rubber gasket.  I reset the commode.  It still leaked.

 

Since the hospital construction crew had installed several toilets in the housing complex last year I decided to see if there was a left-over wax ring that I could borrow.  To my excitement I found two!  I grabbed both and headed home.  I installed the first above the gasket, and the second below.  It worked!  Now we were at least back to where we had been, with the addition of a small leak under the sink.

 

We limped through the next few weeks, going through the flushing routine daily, until our guests left. I did have Abdulio open the septic tank again, to find it so full of water that we could not see anything.  So I decided to bury the barrel for the wash water.

 

Jose Abdulio, our gardener, Adam and I took our turns drilling holes in the barrel over the next few days, each working until the batteries of the drill ran out.  After I chose a site for the barrel, Jose Abdulio carefully marked a circle the size of its lid.  I suggested he start wider and get narrower at the bottom, but he insisted, so I let him be.  In a few hours he had dug a perfect cylinder with barely two inches of clearance around the circumference of the barrel.  We chipped a hole in the washroom wall and ran the drainpipe from the washing machine into the barrel, buried the whole thing, and were in business.

 

Then came the rains!  The yard was flooded, and we couldn’t do much else until things dried out. 

 

After the water level dropped, we opened the septic tank.  When we flushed the toilet, no water came through the drainpipe from the house, even though water seemed to be flowing sufficiently down the commode.  We then turned our attention to our second septic tank, which was more than 50 ft from the house, and had been cemented over.  We had thought that tank had been disconnected when the addition to the house had been built.  My hopes were raised as I observed that the line from the house to the old tank passed beneath two trees!

 

Jose Abdulio carefully exposed the pipe from house to tank, which to my disappointment, appeared free from any breakage or roots!  Jose Abdulio then chipped open the cemented lid of the old tank.  It was only half full, and indeed when we flushed, water entered the tank.  We then disconnected the pipe at a joint between the house and tank that had not been cemented.  We flushed the pipe with water.  The pipe was clear.  We then bit the bullet and cut the pipe a couple of feet from the house and checked the pipe beyond that, which also proved clean.  

 

We ran the snake into the pipe under the house, and at 25 ft encountered resistance.  I withdrew the snake to find some strands of root.  How could roots be growing under the house 20 plus feet from the nearest plant? 

 

As we considered our next step, hoping there was a straight shot to the roots, we took two 20 ft lengths of 2-inch PVC pipe, and joined them with a rubber hose clamp. At the leading edge we notched the tube to give it “teeth”.  Near that end we drilled some holes and ran stiff wire through, leaving ends and angles exposed to catch the roots.  Near the junction of the two pipes, we drilled another set of holes in the leading pipe, which would be pushed totally under the house out of site and reach if the coupler came apart.  We ran a long wire tether through this to retrieve the pipe if needed.

 

We passed the pipe until we hit resistance.  We then rotated the pipe several turns and withdrew it to find the wire at the end tangled with roots!  We repeated the process again and again.  For you medical folks, it reminded me of passing a Fogerty catheter down a clogged artery, retrieving clots!  As we obtained less roots, we then added an attachment to the end of the pipe: a circular saw bit used to cut holes in doors for doorknobs fit the end of the pipe perfectly.  This helped us clear additional root material.

 

As we then checked the toilet, it flushed without restriction!

 

We have not yet buried the pipe, planning to wait a couple of days to be sure the job is finished.  I wonder how quickly those roots might grow back, and if they might grow somewhere else, around a bend, where they can’t be reached!  I wonder if Roto Rooter would be interested in opening an office in Balfate!

 

Dave Drozek with

 

Thoughts from Honduras