The Town of Warrenton’s sewage treatment plant dates from 1958, and close to three in ten homes inside the town limits are older than 1960. The Town’s design manual still details tying house lines into old clay and concrete mains. On the house side, a line laid from the late 1940s into the early 1970s may be Orangeburg, a tar paper pipe that sags out of round with age and can be torn up by a drain cable. If nobody knows what’s under your yard, the camera goes in first.
Under the Town Code, a stoppage in the public main is the Town’s to clear. One in your house sewer is yours, and if it’s still there 48 hours after the town manager’s notice, the Town may clear it and bill the cost plus 20 percent. Starting the camera at the curbside cleanout shows which side of that line a clog or a break sits on, and how far out.
About a third of the town’s homes went up from 1980 through 1999, and more than a quarter since 2000, mostly on PVC. The Town’s manual calls for a house lateral at least 4 inches across, at a 2 percent slope or steeper, with a cleanout at the right-of-way line and another every 50 feet. A line that fell short of that slope, or settled in its trench, holds water in a low spot the footage shows plainly.
Out past the town line, sewer came late. The County’s plan for the New Baltimore service district says it had no public sewer before 1999, and most of the district still sits outside the sewer area, so plenty of houses there are on septic, which we don’t work on. The exceptions are Vint Hill, on the plant FCWSA took over from the Army in 1997 and the County replaced in 2010, and Brookside, whose 945 lots the County approved as sewered. FCWSA counts the pipe from its main to your house as yours, except the stretch under a public street.