WIAAN Maas didn’t make much of the the situation when he tried to flush the toilet in the main bedroom on Sunday evening, April 26 and the water didn’t run as smoothly as usual.
“I just thought it must be a problem with one of our pipes, you know,” he explained.
But the next morning his partner, Johan, woke up to make a not-so-pleasant discovery in the back of their yard.
“I was walking towards the garage when I saw the garden was flooded with water. At first I assumed it was just a burst pipe,” Johan said.
But the persistent foul smell in the air led to the discovery of a massive sewage spill in their backyard.
“It literally looked like we had a mini island in the middle of our garden,” Wiaan added.
All the drains outside the house were blocked and the toilets weren’t flushing at all.
“We immediately called the municipality, which was at around 7am, and spoke to a woman who assured us the situation would be logged as an emergency and workers would be at our home within 24 hours.”
Although the metro missed their promised deadline by a couple of hours, officials did eventually arrive at the Glen Marais home on the Tuesday at about 11.30am to resolve the situation. Cables were placed inside the yard and the sewage was sucked out.
“The officials from the department told us the problem wasn’t a burst pipe but that the roots of one of the trees in the yard had grown in such a way that they clogged up the sewage pipes, causing the sewage to find alternative ways to escape.”
An open manhole cover the couple had reported last year November was also finally replaced.
“Although the situation is finally solved, it still posed such a huge health risk for us as well as our dogs, which we had to put inside the house as they kept running into the dirt. And now we’re also left with this huge mess to clean, including the drains and the yard.”
