Truth Won’t Stay Buried For Very Long

First came firestorm. Then came ice storm. Now comes …

Better to let Kathy Nichols explain the unnatural disaster that turned the back yard of her lovely South Hill home into a bigger mess than the Clinton administration.

“It’s a poop pot,” says Kathy, her voice taking on a low tone of disgust. “It’s horrible.”

There’s a definite air hanging over the Nichols’ abode at 1703 E. 18th. It’s the stench of raw sewage.

Trouble hit the fan last week when Kathy’s beautiful rock garden started oozing a foul-smelling muck into her lush yard. Up from the ground came a-bubblin’ crude, as Jed Clampett might say. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about Texas Tea.

Experts in the drainage arts were called. They officially confirmed what anybody with a working nose could diagnose in one whiff.

Digging commenced. Within days, the sewerologists transformed the aforementioned picturesque rock garden into a cross between an open-pit copper mine and a Third World latrine.

The archeology led to a curious discovery. The Nichols’ problem was not the result of some routine ruptured sewer pipe.

Their toilets and wastewater lines were pouring into an ancient concrete cesspool that came with the 1938 construction of their Cape Cod home.

According to records, the city supposedly connected the house to the city sewer system in 1947. Why the cesspool wasn’t destroyed or rendered inoperative is anybody’s guess.

“I have to assume the contractor perpetrated a fraud,” says Keith Bird of Action Drain. “It’s pretty obvious something happened that shouldn’t have happened.”

Not necessarily, counters Dale Hodges, an inspector for the city’s sewer department.

Sometimes in the bad old days, he explains, sewer lines were linked directly to existing cesspools. That makes about as much environmental sense as paving the rain forest, of course, but saving the planet wasn’t of much concern back then.

It’s also possible the city installed a bypass between the house and the cesspool. Then, if the sewer pipe collapsed or plugged, waste would continue into the big concrete holding vat.

Meanwhile, expenses mount for the Nichols as workers probe for answers.

“How do you begin to clean this up?” wonders a depressed Kathy, who took me on a guided tour of her once-attractive yard. Standing on the rock walkway, we looked down into the tank of filth, steaming in January chill.

There is effluent in there dating back to the Roosevelt administration. After decades of leeching into the ground water, the system finally clogged the surrounding soil and overflowed.

Assuming some nefarious soul pulled a fast one, how does a homeowner right a 50-year-old wrong? The answer is you don’t. “Everybody’s gone,” Kathy laments. “Everybody’s dead.”

It’s doubtful the city has any liability even if some former sewer superintendent signed off on work that wasn’t done.

This is the kind of homeowner quagmire that makes you want to go out and buy a trailer.

The Nichols are probably stuck, which is especially painful considering their occupations. Kathy is a property manager. Her husband, Jamie, sells real estate.

When the couple bought the house in 1977, they checked all the paperwork. They could have conducted a dye test to check the sewer, but who does that?

Maybe they should have been tipped off by the remarkable abundance of foliage that bloomed in their overly fertilized back yard. A botanist friend once remarked that he had seen more varieties of plants growing at Nichols’ homestead than anywhere else.

Kathy’s voice turns tragic: “And here I thought it was because I had a green thumb.”

, DataTimes