Last night

Last night the septic tank in the apartment where I live and work went supernova. By that, I mean it exploded. Unlike stars in space, however, our septic tank cannot expand at the speed of light in an infinite number of directions. The contents of our overflowing tank can only move in one direction, which is down a 3 inch overflow pipe. I don't know who made the final decision to have said overflow pipe end in the basement of the apartment building as opposed to, say, literally ANYWHERE else, but I would love to hear their logic. My guess is the plumber responsible was at one point into competitive paint thinner sniffing. I'm not sure what the rules to that game are, but I know the prize is a pipe that shoots refuse all over the basement.

I wasn't sure what to do to fix the problem, but I knew I needed to stop the water (and I use that term, "water", very loosely) so I shut off the mains to the apartment building. The other tenants were not very happy about that. I told them there was a problem with the septic system and the ground directly under them was rapidly filling with sewage. They were less than sympathetic and still wanted their water on. I tried explaining to them that this was all their fault for using too much water in the first place, at which point they went from being mildly annoyed to openly perturbed. I didn't pay them too much heed, as I had bigger problems than worrying about making friends with the other renters.

Despite no longer being freshly feed, the septic tank filth repository turned filth spewer was still drawing ripe resources from the adjoining leech field and continued to redeposit them in the basement. The contents of the tank needed to be drawn, not discharged (again). There are several sanitation services that are infinitely more qualified to handle these types of problems. Sadly, none of them are staffed at 9pm on a Wednesday evening and thus we were left to our own devices. A pool vacuum attached to large water storage barrels was lowered into the tank to lower the contents level. The original plumbers were creative in their placement of the overflow pipe; it was only fitting the solution to the problems that decision created be equally creative.

After trucking off nearly 700 gallons of waste (or, in more relative units, about 14 bathtubs full of refuse) we turned our attention to the standing water problem in the basement. A perfectly good shop vac was ruined sucking up the two to three inches of water, ruined because no equipment is fit for duty after going through what we put that vacuum through. This morning I nuked the crap out of that room (literally) with ammonia. Normally you distill ammonia with water and use it to clean, but not when you're cleaning up after what happened last night. Then you open a bottle of ammonia, dump it directly on the floor, grab another one, repeat. About halfway through my third bottle I began to feel my lungs changing color, from a healthy pink to a molting canary yellow, and I thought I might be getting a little carried away. But I ascribe to the axiom "better safe than sorry" and dumped another two bottles on there before running outside for some oxygen. Today the basement's clean again, but if you drop a sandwich on the floor down there you might just want to let it go, five second rule notwithstanding.