The City of Falls Church looks after about 47 miles of sewer pipe and more than 1,000 manholes, and it relines those mains to keep rain and groundwater out of them. The pipe from your house to that main is another matter. The City says the owner owns the lateral up to the main and keeps it up, and its sewer page adds that much of the water leaking into the system gets in on private property, through owners’ own laterals and drains, sometimes unnoticed. So the same page suggests a television inspection of your lateral.
Age is most of the reason. The typical owner’s house went up in 1957 in West Falls Church, 1958 in Lake Barcroft, 1961 in Pimmit Hills and 1964 inside the City. A lateral from those years has been in the ground sixty or seventy years, every joint in it carrying the weight of the soil and whatever roots have found it.
Pimmit Hills is mostly single-family houses, yet close to a quarter of its homes went up since 2000. Where a newer house stands on an older lot, ask whether the line to the street was replaced with it. Sometimes it was. Sometimes the new plumbing was tied into the old lateral, and nobody at the closing table can say which.
Across the line, Fairfax County’s own sewer diagram draws the owner’s part all the way to the county’s sewer, and marks what goes wrong along it: deterioration, cracks, separated joints, root intrusion and a cleanout left uncapped. The camera finds the first four from inside the pipe. In Bailey’s Crossroads and Seven Corners, where about 8 in 10 homes share a building with other units, the line out of it is usually the association’s or the landlord’s.