March 2006: The Cesspool Mystery

March 18th, 2006

This is an old house (by local stan­dards) with many unknown chap­ters in it’s early life. When we were build­ing our bath­room addi­tion, we con­verted our waste water sys­tem to a grey­wa­ter process, leav­ing only the toi­let on the cesspool. We didn’t know much about the cesspool, only that it was old enough to be a cesspool and not a sep­tic tank, but cer­tainly not where it was located.

One wet day the toi­let stopped func­tion­ing reli­ably. It became quickly clear the trou­ble was well beyond the toi­let, so with a mis­sion to avoid a huge plumb­ing bill, we bought a 50′ snake. (You plumbers can now laugh…) I suc­ceeded in learn­ing that the snake was totally unwill­ing to nav­i­gate what­ever lay down that mys­te­ri­ous pas­sage, while not improv­ing the per­for­mance of the toi­let one bit. I needed pro­fes­sional help, but first, I did a lit­tle research on the web to bet­ter under­stand cesspools, sep­tic tanks and all. It was a lit­tle fright­en­ing, but I would find help.

The mys­tery begins with this rather mun­dane look­ing fix­ture just beneath the toilet.

There hap­pen to be a lot of cesspools on the island, and soon I was talk­ing to a local com­pany that pumps cesspools. Their first ques­tion was “is it uncov­ered?” Uncovered? I didn’t even know where it was! The kind woman from the san­i­ta­tion com­pany said one of their dri­vers had a side­line find­ing and uncov­er­ing people’s cesspools (nat­u­rally). He came over later that after­noon and probes in hand, we began to poke the ground. He was used to see­ing some kind of visual clue to the pool’s loca­tion, but we saw noth­ing that indi­cated where it might be. After learn­ing a bit about how to go about search­ing, he left us to our own devices.

This is when we began to dig. First, I crawled under the house and began to dig around the pipe that con­nected to the toi­let to get some idea of where it went. It was hard going, but I soon came to an elbow that seemed to indi­cate the angle of the pipe going away from the house. Following that, I began to dig a trench along the side of the house in order to inter­cept the pipe as it headed out. This is the stan­dard method.

The first pipe I dis­cov­ered seemed unlikely, but I didn’t know what to expect and was wish­ful. This could never have been the pipe.

I did even­tu­ally find a pipe, but it was terra cotta, not iron! But about the right size and loca­tion, so I dug it out a bit. The angle was odd, but I fig­ured the sys­tem was old and they did things dif­fer­ent on those days, so I began to probe around, try­ing to find out where that pipe went. Soon, Jonathan was help­ing with the prob­ing and sight­ing and we suc­ceeded in map­ping out the path of that old pipe; but by now, we knew the angle was too wrong to be the right pipe.

This very con­vinc­ing draw­ing actu­ally had us look­ing for a cesspool 50 feet from the house!

A day or so later, I found the map. I had seen the cesspool drawn on a map some time back when I was going through all the old records and stuff around here. There was a per­mit appli­ca­tion for the repair work fol­low­ing hur­ri­cane Iniki and in an inset was a site plan with a cesspool lined out. Jonathan came over and we gamely plot­ted out the loca­tion of the cesspool, think­ing we finally had the goods on that pool. But there was no pool and it began to dawn that the draw­ing was sim­ply to sat­isfy the per­mit­ters that the cesspool was some­where out of the way. The archi­tect had no idea where the cesspool actu­ally was.

Back to the pipe. Well, that pipe has to go some­where! So a few days later Jonathan crawled under the house and began to dig around the pipe to get more of the story. We found another elbow, but the direc­tion of the pipe remained the same. When the guy from the sep­tic pump­ing com­pany came over, he said there would be no bend in the pipe, that it would go straight from the toi­let to the cesspool. Although per­fectly log­i­cal, this turned out to be com­pletely mis­lead­ing, like the old pipe and the map.

The pipe on the left was dis­cov­ered by dig­ging under our slab. The pipe is now head­ing for the shower. These two pipes have noth­ing to do with each other.

We doggedly dug around the edge of the bath­room try­ing to find our pipe— and when we did, we found it took a strange lit­tle turn and headed off in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Ominously, it went under our new bath­house slab. No! Please not under the slab! We poked and probed where we thought it should emerge from the slab and found noth­ing. This is where I hit bot­tom and despaired ever find­ing that thing.

The prob­lem here was that the soil was very com­pact and the effort required to find that pipe was over­whelm­ing: it was we fig­ured about three feet down and a nar­row tar­get. I almost threw my back out every time I had to with­draw that piece of rebar we were prob­ing the ground with. But it had to be found. Thinking the pool itself would be eas­ier to find, I began to probe likely spots, fol­low­ing the line of the pipe, and I did find evi­dence of a cesspool under the lime tree. I was con­vinced I had found it and I had Jonathan over to help me uncover it. We found a bunch of ran­dom con­crete buried under the ground. I was too dis­heart­ened to be curi­ous about what we found.

Another dead end, and then Lisa deliv­ered the ulti­ma­tum: find the cesspool in a week or we would install a com­post­ing toi­let. A sen­si­ble, if unac­cept­able, solu­tion. I was deter­mined to find that sucker.

Crafty plumbers hid mult­ple bends and junc­tions like this one to fool ama­teur cesspool hunters.

I decided we needed bet­ter prob­ing tech­nol­ogy, so I fash­ioned a hydraulic probe using some cop­per plumb­ing I had around. It was just a 3 foot piece of 1/2″ pipe with a hose fit­ting and a valve. Hook it up to the water and the water would do the dig­ging and then the probe could be eas­ily removed. I began to sys­tem­at­i­cally probe the area where the pipe was going last we saw it. Learned some inter­est­ing things about the var­i­ous soil strata in the yard, but no cesspool. Dammit.

I asked Jonathan over to help, know­ing the hydraulic probe would “inject” new energy into the project. He insisted we go back to fol­low­ing that pipe. Of course, he was right, but the prospect of find­ing that thing was daunt­ing. I had already probed where we thought the pipe would emerge from the bath­house and found noth­ing, but we probed some more and even­tu­ally gave that up and started dig­ging. That’s when we found that ras­cally (still not know­ing just how ras­cally) pipe. Now we knew the pool wasn’t under our slab, thank God. But we couldn’t find the pipe beyond the point where we found it, now that we knew it’s angle better.

So we dug some more and lo! there was an elbow. Yet we could only fol­low that new pipe angle for about three feet. We dug at the spot we lost the trail and there was a ‘Y’ con­nect­ing to another pipe! Also a new angle for our pipe. No bends, indeed! Here were at least four! However, this last one turned out to be a solid lead as we fol­lowed the pipe with our trusty probe out to where the solar pan­els are. Well, those pan­els would be a lot eas­ier to move than the slab would have been! We found the cesspool, finally, after three weeks, innu­mer­able probes and twelve holes, next to the solar pan­els. We began to out­line it’s perimeter.

The lit­tle white sticks mark the perime­ter of the cesspool’s con­crete lid.

I fig­ured the next day I would just uncover the hatch and we could pump the pool, so I called the san­i­ta­tion com­pany. The next day I got the mes­sage that the dri­ver would be by later in the day, so I began dig­ging. The hatch is sup­posed to be in the cen­ter, so I found the spot and started there. Nothing, just a blank con­crete slab. I dug more, expos­ing a wider cir­cle. Nothing!! So, I thought it would be near the inlet, so I began to dig there, but this was com­pli­cated by the fact that this was under the solar pan­els, so I had to jack up the pan­els to dig under them. I found noth­ing. By then, the dri­ver was com­ing, so I just hoped for his advice. Maybe they would knock a hole it it or some­thing… When the dri­ver got to the scene, with his huge tank truck, he just scratched is head and offered his guess on where the open­ing would be. More dig­ging, more noth­ing. Eventually, he went away and told me to call when I found it. This was silly; but deter­mined to find that hatch, I kept dig­ging. By now, it was clear it was in some ran­dom loca­tion some­where within the 14 foot cir­cle we outlined.

Here is the hatch, a huge pit lies through the opening.

I did find the hatch after a few min­utes of dig­ging and called the dri­ver on his cell­phone. I cleared the earth away from a block of con­crete sit­ting over the open­ing. When the dri­ver arrived, I moved the block away and we both looked into a huge, empty pit. The sur­face of the con­tents was a good 10 feet down! There was really no need to pump. We asked Joanna to flush the toi­let, and the water came pour­ing out of the inlet pipe down, down into the pit. Seems the cesspool was filled with rain­wa­ter, and con­sid­er­ing the last tor­ren­tial rains were just a cou­ple of days ago, we had some pretty good drainage in that pit.

It was a lot of effort, many blank leads and emo­tional turn­arounds but we now know about the cesspool and why it’s giv­ing us trou­ble. There is a whole par­al­lel story in our lives as the cesspool saga coin­cided with a drawn out cri­sis around how we spend our time and make our liv­ing. Two major busi­ness propo­si­tions and a restruc­tur­ing at the Lotus brings us to a more man­age­able rela­tion­ship with our beloved vegan con­cern. A week’s visit by our new friends Baker and Michaele brought a deeply open­hearted per­spec­tive. We shall see how it all unfolds; like the drama of the cesspool, noth­ing has changed, yet every­thing has changed. For me, this com­pletely sen­si­ble because the sig­nif­i­cant change has been to more deeply detach from the prob­lems of life being solved. I’m grow­ing in my under­stand­ing that they will never be solved, those dra­mas are just an end­less loop, and there­fore life’s mean­ing is not to be found there. This is tremen­dously liberating.