When my dirty disaster happened, my maintenance man told me that by law, the landlord is required to have any carpeting involved steam-cleaned and disinfected. Poop contains lots and lots of nasty things. My sluml… er… landlord didn’t have mine cleaned, but then, I was living there off-lease (for cheaper rent) and he was a cheap bastard.
I hope this meets your high standards, chatelaine. The overflowing toilet that flooded a fair bit of the airport terminal when I was hiding from the amorous Amazon was only a small part of the Pickle Lake Low: http://my.tbaytel.net/culpeper/PickleLakeLow.htm
Sometimes, the toilets overflow with a vengance…
I spent a fair number of years in submarines. Out to sea, the sanitary tanks are emptied by pressurizing them and blowing them over the side into the ocean. While doing that, you cannot operate the toilets, lest you wind up “blowing shitters on yourself.” It’s rare, though it has happened. I personally know someone to whom it happened. An officer, no less. Worse still, he was the Officer of the Deck whom had given permission to blow Sans not twenty minutes before, and had forgotten, in his haste to relieve himself, that the tanks were pressurized. I don’t know how he missed both the sign and the latch, but he did. The results are Extremely nasty. Don’t read further if you have a weak stomach.
Lunch Spoiler:
[spoiler]
A solid three-inch column of human waste caught him square in the face. He had shit up his nose, in his mouth, caked between his teeth, under his tongue, down his throat, in his trachea, caked in his ears, even packed under his eyelids!!! His hair was solid and slick like a brownshit helmet, and shitcicles clung to the overhead. The Officer’s Head looked like it had been spray painted dark brown. Even the light was brown, where the sludge had sprayed across the lights. And he was down on his knees, puking his guts out, further enhancing the problem.
The procedure for cleaning up this sort of thing is for the victim to scrub themselves with detergent and a betadine/iodine scrub over the whole body. His hair is shaved so that he can scrub his scalp. Then the boat’s Doc gives him antibiotic shots, antibiotic rinse for his mouth, and cleans out his eyelids, nose, and ears with an antibiotic rinse & swabs. Once the victim has been decontaminated, he gets to don tyvek suits (usually double suited), and go in and sterilize the head and the shower he had just used, top-to-bottom. Probably while still puking.[/spoiler]
The results of blowing Sans on oneself are so nasty that it’s a very rare occurance.
We had a houseful of guests over the weekend, and on Tuesday night (after they’d all gone, thank God) the plumbing started backing up. It was somewhat innocuous at first; when Mr. Legend drained the upstairs tub, it bubbled back up into the downstairs tub. It wasn’t too awful, just some bits of leaf litter and dirt, and we figured that the recent snowfall had saturated the ground and maybe something had leaked in through a crack in the pipe. I plunged the tub drain and all seemed to be working.
The next morning, someone flushed an upstairs toilet and everything that had been flushed for what looked like the last 12 hours came rushing up into the downstairs tub and toilet. There was at least six inches of raw sewage in the tub, and the toilet spilled over slowly onto the floor as I desperately put the oldest rags in the house around it. I called Roto-Rooter out, and $110 later, the nice man showed me the fruits of his labor: six “feminine hygeine products,” strings still attached.
My girls, innocent though I know they are, still got the “never, ever flush these things” lecture, just for future reference. I hope to God someone gives the same lecture to whichever of my guests it is whose mother neglected the task.
Turning off the valve MAY work. But once the water rises too high, your only hope is to remove the ceramic cover and slam the damn flapper down. The flapper is basically the doorway that allows water to enter the bowl.
I had the stomach flu. I was on the way to work, when I felt some rumbling. Luckily, I would pass through a shopping mall to get to the metro. I rushed to the nearest washroom.
The door to the only stall was locked, and there was a sign saying the toilet was out of order.
That wasn’t going to stop me. I slid my backpack under the door, and then crawled under. I ripped off my coat as I sat down, hanging it on the door. I did my thing, stood up, and flushed.
That’s when the torrent of shit started. Little did I know the stall door was locked from both the outside and the inside. I slid my coat and backpack out, and then frantically crawled out, just barely escaping the spreading puddle of crap. And I don’t think it was just my crap, either.
The poor bastard who had to clean that up.
Years ago, i managed an apartment building. A pecularity of the building was that the toilets in the changing room by the swimming pool were the lowest outlet and also nearest the sewer main. Another pecularity is that the outflow pipe had an inadequate capacity for the building and so would regularly back up, requiring me to call a plumber to snake it out with great haste – because the entire time the main remained clogged, all the nasty that was flushed in any of the 40+ units found its way out of the bowls of the changing-room toilets.
You try asking more than a hundred people to please avoid flushing the toilet, for the love of god.
The best part of all this is that plumbers just clear the pipes and skedaddle. The guy who got to regularly don the overalls, galoshes, and surplus respirator, and then use a snowshovel to clear two rooms and a hallway of raw sewage before mopping up with Dettol? Well, that was me.
You’d be amazed at what people flush. Poop and TP you expect. Condoms? Hey, it’s nice to know someone is having a better afternoon than me. Tampons? Those filled me with rage, since that’s the kind of irresponsible flushing that probably led me to be ankle-deep in other people’s waste. Most puzzling? A banana. Mashed. With the skin on. (This was after the clog.) What the hell? I sure I don’t want to know.
Anyway, after the third or fourth time that happened, I was pretty anxious to find myself another situation. Oh yeah.
Anyway, from the spectacular beshittings of the remote past, we jump to… …yesterday.
That’s right, yesterday. It started innocently enough, with a kitchen sink that wouldn’t drain. Drain opener dinna touch it. I energetically plungered it, and evidently the clog was stronger than my pipes, because the pipe split at the threaded part that connects to the drain. I don’t have a pipe-wrench big enough to do the job myself, and I figure the clog was probably going to have to be snaked out, so I call a plumber.
Turns out, the clog was much further down, in the main outflow pipe. This means that by the time the pipes had been replaced and the clog had been cleared, my kitchen floor was full of poop. (The plumber stuck a little pipe-weasle down there that was supposed to inflate and seal the pipe, and then force pulsating water down. It was screwed up and didn’t inflate, so it just sent jets of lumpy, poopy water into my kitchen. It took an awful lot of poopy water flowing back up the pipe, several times, before he worked out why the thing wasn’t sealing the pipe and skipped out to buy a replacement.)
There isn’t enough Lysol in the world. You know, when your kitchen smells like a port-o-let for a few of hours, it’s time to take all the dishes out of the cupboards and soak them in bleach for a while. Bleargh.
When we lived in New Jersey, with a 120 year old septic tank, the sewer backed up into the dishwasher one day. That was fun.
Here we had the toilet in our bathroom, furthest from the street, overflow twice, once into the shower. We had the Power Rooter guys come, who tried to unblock it from the toilet, with only moderate success. Finally we found the access to the sewer line around the side of the house, rented a power snake, and reamed it out. Problem solved. Six months ago water in the shower started going down slowly, so we reamed it out again, not taking any chances.
If your house has access, I advise you to try it - a lot cheaper than the plumber, and a lot more effective.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
that. was. disgusting.
Yeah, somehow I don’t think we’re going to hear anything more repellant than Tranquilis’ story.
The poor bastard.
That’s what spoiler boxes are for…
The sad thing was that he was one of the better, more easy-going officers aboard. Not the sort of guy to which you’d want that happen. I’ve got other sad stories of shipboard waste control (or failure thereof), but that was far and away the worst.
No lieu ? 
Second sea-story of fecal mater and bad karma…
Shipboard, the lines, pumps, and tankage handling human waste are known as the CHT system, standing for Collection, Holding, and Transfer. CHT. Pronounce it as a word, fast, and it even sounds like shit: Cht! We got some cht to handle, man!
These lines (‘pipes’ to you land lubbers) cake up internally, and every so often have to be cleared. The standard way to do this is to close off all valves ‘upstream’ of the head, take a fire hose, attach a special fitting to the end, and force it into one of the commodes in any particular head. Charging the hose will blow high-pressure water ‘downstream’ into the CHT tanks, blasting the lines clean in the process. Then you restore the valve line up, go to the next head ‘upstream’ and repeat, until all heads on that branch of the system are blown clear. Why work your way ‘upstream’? Well, I’ll tell ya…
Early one morning, the Damage Controlmen on my sub tender thought they’d get an early start on their day’s work, and went to work with that day’s list of heads & CHT lines to be cleared. They started at the top of the piping tree. Each head they cleared forced more and more solid waste from the piping downstream, until the large mass of fecal matter jammed, with more following behind it. This shit-plug blocked the pipes with a vengance, and the Damage Controlmen didn’t understand what was making it so difficult to force the lines clear. So they kept on trying, forcing more and more sludge into the plug. Eventually, pressure built to the point where something had to give, and at a corroded weak spot, the CHT lines burst.
Right into the Fleet Machine Shop.
The Fleet Machine Shop was a very large space, and it was one of the major transit points on the second deck, with many hundreds of people passing through it every hour. Especially in the AM, when people are headed to their shops for Morning Quarters. Did I mention that the dinks responsible had started early that day…? Well, when the CHT line burst, it was at the high traffic point in the AM. Several hundred gallons of pressurized waste was flung into the Machine Shop and onto the equipment, decks, and sailors present. It then formed a nasty puddle about an inch deep over the entire shop floor, getting in amongst the machine tool pedestals and foundations.
Clean up took days.
That is why you start at the bottom, and work your way up! Each head them only contributes a relative small amount to solid waste to the lines as you blow them clear, and the heads further upstream have clear lines waiting for them when they’re blown clean. There’s never more than one head’s worth of shit being blown down the lines. But not that day!
I haven’t read the thread, but I thought I’d share…
I was living in a flat in L.A. The 30-unit building was U-shaped, and mine was the last apartment served by the plumbing on the ‘bottom end’ of the U. One of my not-too-bright neighbours ran out of toilet paper… So she used paper towels. :eek: Needless to say, it stoppered the pipe. I had ‘raw sewage’ bubbling out of my bathtub drain, and the toilet overflowed. Good lord, what a mess!
I had to deal with people ‘upstream’ putting rice into their sinks, which caused a blockage in my kitchen sink. On a couple of occasions, I had to deal with untidy neighbours whose little cockroaches found their way into my flat. (Fortunately, only a few and only a couple of times.) I had to deal with ants that came into the apartments during the hot, dry season in search of water. I’ve had to deal with upstairs neighbours with a creaky bed who would have sex every night whilst I was trying to sleep. (I finally left them a note, and they bought a new bed.) But the shit-storm in the bathroom was the worst.
Fatcat and his partner-in-crime, Littlecat, clogged my toilet Christmas Eve before last. Luckily, I my girlfriend at the time lived in the apartment below mine so we were able to catch the flood before it got too bad.
We were watching a DVD at we heard guilty-feet trotting all around upstairs. We’re used to the sound of thunder-paws, when they are playing race-'n-chase, but there was something definitely suspicious about the trotting sounds we were hearing from above… so I went to investigate.
Clean water was overflowing from the toilet and had pooled in the bathroom. I grabbed a mop, turned off the toilet’s water supply and used an old paint can to bail the excess into the bathtub (which I promptly bleached, even though the water was clean it was still toilet water and gave me the willies).
Nothing is open Christmas Eve so I wasn’t able to buy a plunger until the next day when I got a really lousy cheap one from the variety store.
After a bit of vigorous plunging, a foam rubber cat toy came up. :dubious:
Now, Fatcat is famous for flushing the toilet. He used to like keeping his toys in water, but this time it didn’t seem quite right. He hasn’t put his toys in water since he was a kitten. Littlecat, hwever, likes to put balls in the bathtub to play with them (I guess she likes the way they are “trapped” in the tub). So the best guess we could come up with is that Littlecat, in her zeal, managed to bounce the ball into the toilet, and Fatcat subsequently flushed as he does customarily for his own amusement.
Then again we could be wrong and it may have been a deliberate act of sabotage. Furry bastards! This is why my toilet lid is always closed.
The one time I forget – the furballs flood the place! :smack:
My husband works for an apartment complex, and they had a similar thing happen in an “end of the line” apartment in the basement of one their buildings. Unfortunately, this apartment was vacant at the time and no one realized what was going on. By the time they found out that the main sewage line was blocked from that building, the basement apartment had about 6 inches of raw sewage covering the entire floor.
We had the problem not too long ago, and it was because of me. :o I’m embarrased to this day about it. Anyway, luckily our bathroom floor is tiled (I’ve seen carpeted bathrooms and never got that one!) but we ended up getting a new floor mat and everything was bleached.
It’s a paranoia for me too, to the point where I really try not to poop at other people’s houses. And the worst of it is, my bf’s parents live in Long Island, where the water pressure is apparently notoriously low.
Fortunately my cup hasn’t runneth over in a couple of years now. Even so, it hardly compares with Tranquilis’ tale.
Nothing terribly gross to tell you. The other week, though, the toilet overflowed JUST as I was heading out the door to some important thing I was late for. Most of the detritus had exited before the water began to rise, but much to my chagrin, I had to foist it off on Hamish as I left.
I’ve two more, nearly as nasty as the first, if anyone wants them.