Yikes....Flood!!!!

Ah the joys of winter. That's right! Winter! Just went out to the store only to discover that my whole street is flooded under a foot of water. A water main broke a few blocks away and all the water rushed towards my block since I apparently live in the lowest section of town.

A few years ago, our town experienced a major flood during a major rainfall. It wasn't a pretty site. We got a major downpour in a short amount of time. The power was knocked out. When that happened, there's supposed to be a switch that triggers automatically to fire up a generator to run the town's sewage system. Guess what........the switch failed and the generator didn't turn on. The sewage system backed up all over town. Raw sewage was spewing out of every manhole for 5 blocks flooding half the town. Anyone with a basement bathroom/shower had major problems. This all happened at 11pm and within 10 minutes, my neighbour's basement had over 3 ft of sewage pour out of his toilet and shower downstairs. Over 100 houses ended up being flooded with sewage. The house I'm currently in was one of them. At the time, we were living just across the back lane and didn't have a basement so we weren't affected. Everyone else on our block was.

Yep.....that was a shity night for our town.

Are appropriate pumps working to keep things under control?

groomerguyNWO said:

Yep.....that was a shity night for our town.

Click to expand...

I'll say uke:

Yes, as far as I can tell, the water is going down. Just flooded the street all at once. Now, there a town worker out infront of my house making sure the water is draining and they've got a crew working to repair the broken water main.

Glad to hear it!

We get broken water mains a lot here too. Had two just this week.

I work for our city's sewer dept. and when I read how much sewage was coming up in peoples' homes, I got a sick feeling. People here like to try to sue the city if they get backup, so we're constantly documenting things to cover our backsides. We do pretty well, but there was that one last summer.....

Anyway, I'm glad this one didn't turn out so bad. Hope the rest of the winter is uneventful.

I agree. Busted water mains are pretty common here too. The sewage thing caught everyone offguard though. It was something to see. The whole town was pitch dark due to the power outage and everyone, I mean everyone, was out roaming the streets in their pyjama's. It was a freak storm that dropped a huge amount of rain within a few minutes and with no pumps running, the sewage started spewing out everywhere. I was just getting home from work when it wall happened. What a smell though!

Does your storm water run into the sanitary system directly? Or, was there a tremendous amount of infiltration?

How long of a time period between the rain and the backups??

Yes, I'm pretty sure it runs directly. The rain, power outage and the backups happened all within about 20 or so minutes of each other. I had left work at 11 pm and the power was still on. I got home at 11:30 and the power had just gone out and the sewage was just begining to overflow.

Some systems work that way. Stupid as it is.

We got a 4" rainfall in the matter of one hour, last summer. We have a lot of infiltration problems. Our storm and sanitary sewer systems are not run together, just where storm water infiltrates the sanitary. Nobody had backup, that I heard of, but our main lift station handled an extra 600,000 gals of water that day.

If I recall correctly, we got around 6" rainfall in about twenty minutes. It was crazy. That, with the power outage and the backup system failing, caused the sewage to back up.

Yup! That'd do it. We don't have backup gens on our lifts.There're 20 of 'em here. 18 pump toward the main lift station, the 20th has its own forcemain out to the lagoons because it serves an industrial park which has only on industry in it.