<p>Ooh, I have a sewer story.</p>
<p>We bought a first-floor unit in a triple decker - a three-unit building with one apartment per floor. All the inspections went well, and we got a tenant to move in.</p>
<p>Almost immediately after he complained that he would come home and there would be crud in the tub. It seemed like the drain was backing up into the tub if a lot of water was used. Fortunately it never overflowed his tub…</p>
<p>We got our plumber out, who cleaned out all the drain lines, to no avail.</p>
<p>So we brought in a sewage line clean-out firm (a Roto Rooter-type company) and they came out and ran their spinny thingy (technical name) down the line to the street, only to hit a blockage that they couldn’t clear.</p>
<p>So they ran a camera down the pipe, and when they got to the end the pipe just… stopped. No roots, no blockage, just no pipe.</p>
<p>Finally figured out… when the city had redone the sewer main on the street a few months before we bought it, they somehow neglected to hook back up the sewer line for the building! Oops.</p>
<p>So for two months, stuff was just emptying into the ground. The extra person (our tenant) added enough extra waste water that the ground couldn’t absorb it, and it started backing up into our unit.</p>
<p>They were out there the next day digging up the street… I never saw a city department move that fast. We (everyone really) were extraordinarily lucky the first floor didn’t get flooded with raw sewage. The city’s contractor covered all the plumbing bills, I think they were afraid we were going to sue them.</p>