Last week we received a call from a property owner on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn after experiencing his third sewer backup of the month. His tenants had been managing the issue and finally insisted on having a camera inspection to determine what was causing the continuous backups.
What they didn’t know was that one of the previous plumbers got their sewer snake stuck in the drain, which was only determined by the video inspection. The sewer snake was not the actual problem but certainly did not assist in allowing their sewage to flow as needed. It turns out that the plumbing snake got stuck in a section of sewer pipe that was separated and was not getting more severe backups due to the snake creating a secondary obstruction. The only option now was to excavate and remove the sewer snake. The camera inspection determined that the snake was stuck 25’ away from the sewer trap which would put us in the roadway.
Sewer snake inside clay pipe |
Once we obtained all required permits the job was scheduled and we began by excavating the roadway down to the city sewer.
Excavating in road with backhoe for sewer repair
Luckily for this property owner we were able to remove the drain snake from the point we had excavated and did not require any additional work.
Excavating in road with backhoe for sewer repair |
The new 6” extra heavy cast iron pipe was installed and scheduled for DEP inspection later that day.
The sewer snake is removed! |
Now that the city inspection was completed, the on site crew began back-filling the roadway excavation and tampering in preparation for final roadway restoration.
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A job like this takes time to diagnose and understand the exact problem. The owner had originally received a quote to replace the entire sewer line, he was told that this is the only way to resolve his issue. In this case Team Harris took a few days to research all details associated with the sewer line backup before providing a viable resolution to the owner.
