Categories
Mississippi

Hidden leakage

[Recent runs: 24th: 3.25; 26th: 3.25; today (28th): 3.25]

We noticed recently that part of our yard was noticeably greener and wetter than the rest.

This past weekend I got the shovel out and we did some exploring.

The house was constructed with a single underground box digester system. I don’t know what the difference is between that and a normal septic tank except that the output of septic usually goes to a septic-field which is a wide-spread pattern of pipes which distribute the output over a certain amount of square footage.

Ours has a single pipe that goes down the hill a little bit, then makes a 45 degree angle and comes out on the edge of the trees on what is really our neighbor’s property. I don’t know if that is really the way it is supposed to be done. But that’s what it is.

A long time ago our neighbor was mowing with his bush hog and he ran over that 45 degree joint and broke it up a bit. I dug around it, put an old license plate over the hole and covered it all back up.

So anyway, having been gone a couple of years, now we are back and you can see in the picture that it was leaking from the covered up hole and the grass downhill from there was turning swampy like the former emptying spot was wont to do.

So I dug up the joint again. The joint was in the same condition, including the Colorado license plate covering. But the water was not going through the pipe to the tree-side spot. So we used the spade to follow that line and we eventually located the end of the pvc pipe. It was clogged up with a couple inches of mud! We got that cleaned out and now we are back to the original configuration.

I suspect in one of his infrequent tractor/bush-hog mowing operations the neighbor ran over the pipe and filled it with mud. I don’t really know.

Here’s a picture of the unwanted new swamp in the middle and on the far right of the meadow is the old swamp.