Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
A ball of baby wipes has resulted in a $2,000 sewer repair in Farmington.
After two visits from Roto-Rooter, including one when a service technician descended a 27-foot well to cut up the mass of wipes with a knife, the problem appears cleared.
Farmington Mayor Ron Dugan looks down one of the pumps that was plugged with baby wipes.“I would say it’s solved,” said Farmington Mayor Ron Dugan. “We are thinking now about putting some kind of strainer in there to prevent it from happening again.”
In the meantime, Dugan has sent an urgent notice to Farmington residents asking them to refrain from flushing the wipes – often labeled “flushable” — down toilets.
In the 18-inch diameter pipe, the wipes added up, said Dugan.
“They just twist around and twist around each other to form a big glob,” he said.
The glob clogged one of the two pumps in the town’s sewer wet well.
Over the course of three weeks, the glob, or “mophead” as Dugan described it, plugged one pump, got blown out of it and then plugged the other pump.
Farmington’s wet well has four-inch pipes with a 90-degree elbow, which sends material to the lagoon in one direction or back down the pipe to the other pump, which has a check valve that opens and closes.
“If pump one is clogged, you run pump two and open the check valve on pump one,” said Dugan. “The problem is the path of least resistance for that mophead is back down the other pipe.”
Chase Burt, a service technician for Roto-Rooter of Lewiston came out on Jan. 9, and determined it was a bigger job than initially thought, after efforts with a pump hose to suck up the wipes failed.
He visited a second time, on Jan. 17, along with service technician Adam Franklin.
The city shut off the in-flow to the wet well and Burt descended a 14-foot manhole just outside the fence from the well, to close the sewer line.
With the flow off and the sewer line stopped, Burt then stood over the wet well with a harness.
Dugan and part-time city maintenance worker Brian Oliver set up a winch used for the sewer pumps and lowered Burt, wearing bibs and a jacket, 27 feet down to the bottom of the wet well.
Because of methane gas, he was attached to a 10-inch air hose to breathe.
Once at the bottom, Burt cut the mophead apart with a Leatherman knife.
“We couldn’t get enough suction on the pump hose to pull it up,” said Burt, explaining the need to go down in there himself.
At the bottom, he first used the pump hose to suck up excess muck, before taking care of the ball of wipes.
“It was too tough to tear apart,” he said. “I’m sure it took months or years to get that many wipes.”
Dugan, who worked with former mayor Royce Johnson to solve this problem, said the pumps are at 85 percent capacity now, running at 118 and 128 gallons per minute, compared to their capacity of 140-150.
“It took several years to build up the problem in there,” said Johnson.
Dugan said the pumps move 20,000 gallons a day.
The reason for the lack of capacity pumping is unclear.
Dugan theorizes that there are still some wipes wrapped around the impellers, compartments on a circle in the inner workings of the pumps, which if blocked, can infringe on the pumps’ capacity.
“The only thing we can surmise is that we still have some (wipes) left in there,” he said.
For now, though, the system is functioning.
“It normally is a problem-free system, but sometimes there is a problem,” Dugan said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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