Lift Station Repaired

On a ship, the toilet is called the head. When you sail, they warn you not to flush anything down the head that did not go through your head.

The plumbing systems in our homes can handle more than that, but not as much as people use them for, warns the man who services our lift station.

What's the lift station, you ask?

When you flush the toilet, the contents eventually go to a county waste water treatment center. But first, it goes to a big tank with a couple of pumps called a lift station.

Ours is located in a fenced-in area at the corner of Hawthorne Trace and Johanna. Plumbing from our units leads to it, where it collects until our pumps send it into the county lines on its way to the treatment plant.

February 17th, a circuit breaker tripped and shut off both of the pumps. Sewage backed up until it pooled on one of our streets.

One pump came back on as soon as electricity began flowing to it again. The other needed major repairs. Robert Spicher, the man who services our lift station, says we can get by with one pump for short durations but long-term it won't be enough to do the job.

Spicher completed the repair job on the second pump last week. Both of our pumps are working normally now.

He warns that we risk damage to the pumps — and expensive repair jobs for the HOA — by flushing things down our toilets that we should not. Things like napkins, paper towels, tampons, hair, pieces of clothing routinely turn up during repair jobs, Spicher says. The things he finds astonish him.

Yeah, I know. The tampon label says it's flushable. But Tampax doesn't have to pay the $5,800 repair bill for a broken pump. Or $12,000-14,000 to replace one that can't be fixed.

When you flush the toilet, it looks like whatever you put into it simply disappears. But it doesn't. The easier you make it on your community's plumbing system, the better it will work and the cheaper it will be to maintain.

Please put some thought into what you put in your toilets and wash down your drains.