At the university I work at, several toilets in one building keep getting clogged and flooding. Facilities mounted a “don’t rush to flush” campaign reminding people not to flush anything but, and I quote, “pee, poop, and toilet paper.” Clogging and flooding continue apace.
I presume people have flushed “contraband” down toilets since at least the days of Thomas Crapper, so why this spate of incidents? What’s your guess or experience?
Vengeful student/staff/faculty member?
Eco-terrorists?
Cutbacks resulting in less preventive rotorootering in aging (60 year old) building?
Fatbergs caused by cafeteria food and resulting gastrointestinal distress?
The first person to say “overload of bullshit from professors” may see themselves out. But seriously, the facilities people are, ahem, losing their shit over this and it’s getting them down in the dumps. Any thoughts to help them avoid plunging to their deaths?
The plumbing may have been fatally compromised by the presence of the Worm, otherwise known as Shudde M’ell, beneath the building’s foundation. Hints on declogging can be found in the ancient tome De Vermis Mysteris, but the process is risky.
Flushable wipes along with paper towels, tampons, etc. was on the signs and notices they posted of things not to flush.Some wag added “Hopes and dreams OK” to the list in one washroom.
I would really wonder if there is some blockage downstream that is preventing the flushes from exerting their usual force. I have occasionally noticed that after a particularly–ah, voluminous production, the next few flushes seem on the weak side. Eventually, it clears and things are back to normal.
Having lived through several issues (and resulting costly repairs) to my home waste pipes over the past few years, that’d be my suspicion. There may be a partial blockage or other problem in the downstream waste pipes in the OP’s building, and when enough stuff builds up at that problem area (flushable wipes, too much TP, contraband, whatever), it causes toilet back-ups, and the resulting mess.
It may be worth having a plumber come out with a scope, to see what’s happening.
This makes some sense in the context of university cutbacks to maintenance, from cleaning to substantive repairs, including asbestos abatement and black mold remediation. And Jackmannii’s suggestion. That combined with subaltern resistance is where I’d bet, but Facilities is keeping a lid on the movement of information.
The drain line may need to be snaked, or a camera run through it. There might be a tree root blocking the drain pipe. You might need to call a plumber or one of those companies that specialize in blocked drain pipes.
Mercifully, it’s not my call, but I do have to roam far and wide right now to find working facilities. Say, I hear they have bidets installed at the Admin building!
Some of academia’s best output leaves via those pipes. They’d best not remain closed off for long.
I’ve operated tall buildings. Typically the various vertical columns (“stacks”) of plumbing run from rooftop to the lowest occupiable floor and don’t connect laterally until below there. Interesting semi-clogs can develop in the verticals, leading to intermittent backlogs on the several floors above, while the floors just below work fine. As a separate matter, the vent stack that runs alongside can also get messed up. Which tends to affect the entire stack from top to bottom.
A big-building plumber can read the pattern of clogging like a book and know pretty well exactly where to start camera-ing and/or snaking. These aren’t hard problems to diagnose.
OTOH, in a 60yo building they can be very expensive to fix. You may have pipes that are literally crumbling from the inside, and much of the clog(s) is/are flaked-off cast iron from upstream. Running an industrial-strength snake down that line may simply shred the pipes. Leading to not clogs, but whenever somebody flushes or uses the sink, the water and its contents flow out into the wall between e.g. the 3rd and 4th floor. Oops.
There are ways to reline crumbling pipes without closing the building for weeks to tear out all the plumbing and all the walls containing plumbing. But that’s significantly expensive. The sort of thing that goes into a building’s multi-year capital budget, not it’s year-to-year maintenance budget. If the University is cash-strapped enough, they may be unable to afford to fix this. At least until the local Health authority demands they close the building to any/all occupancy until it’s corrected.
This might be trivial. But the fact it’s been ongoing as long as it has, and as extensively as it has, says to me it’s either:
Abject incompetence on management’s part.
A known unaffordably expensive repair and they’re stuck in deer-in-headlights mode.
A known unaffordably expensive repair and they’re actively pressuring their higher authorities for an emergency cash infusion that’s not forthcoming. Yet.
I think you’ve identified the 800 pound gorilla in the room. My guess is the pipes have reached the point where “Captain, they canna take the strain!” Especially when we consider the original building was built for a student population much smaller than it is today and one that stays on campus much longer. That is, due to having to work and other things, students tend to put in long days on campus, eating more meals on campus, etc. leading to more use of the plumbing. Repairs tend to be on an emergency basis: the southeast wing has clogged and flooded, so let’s fix that and hope the rest of the plumbing holds until these washrooms are back online. It’s starting to become, and I apologize in advance, rather a shitstorm.
And I recall a recent conversation with someone who told me that 40 years the increased student population was, plumbing-wise, a disaster waiting to happen. The joke then was “when, not if, all the toilets are flushed at once, the AQ will be washed off the mountain.”
A problem for many universities and business campuses is that in many cases the buildings are all the same age or nearly so. So they all reach end-of-life for their various systems more or less simultaneously.
Universities have expanded as student populations exploded in the 1960s and 70s, then again in later waves, even if some buildings on campus date from the late 1800s. So there’s a batch of them built for the first of the Baby Boomers that now, like their first occupants, are ready to be retired. Finding the money to buy their replacements is the problem.