Inside the City of Manassas the split is simple. The City maintains and repairs the sewer main in the street and its easements; the pipe carrying your waste out to that main is the owner’s to keep up, blockages included. So when a City basement drain backs up and the houses next door are fine, the trouble is usually somewhere between your house and the main: roots at a joint, a sag under the front yard, a break near the curb. A sewer camera inspection, $89 added to the visit, shows which before anybody digs, and digging in the City’s right of way takes a City excavation permit as well.
Now and then the City pushes smoke into its sewer mains to find breaks and defects. The City says the smoke has no odor, isn’t toxic, won’t stain and clears in a few minutes, and some drifting out of the vent pipes on roofs is normal. Smoke inside your house is the finding: the City reads it as defects in the plumbing that could let sewer gas in.
The pipe in the ground follows the City’s history. Its first water and sewer lines went in through the center of town between 1913 and 1916, and the oldest houses around downtown may still drain through cast iron toward those streets. They’re the minority: only about seven in a hundred City homes predate 1960. Just past the line, Loch Lomond is the older pocket, single-family houses with a 1968 median, nearly nine in ten older than 1980, which usually means copper supply and cast iron drains that have had fifty-odd years to rust along the bottom.
In Sudley, Yorkshire, Buckhall and Independent Hill, a house on public lines gets water and sewer from Prince William Water, and a lateral there can’t be repaired or replaced without that utility’s permit and inspection. Heavy rain reaches the sewer too: the City’s sewer page says groundwater and stormwater getting into sewer systems is, in many cases, up to 45 percent of the yearly flow to treatment plants, and that it can wash away the soil a pipe rests on.
