So You Backed That Thing Up
Our Town downtown
February 26, 2007
February 26, 2007
You’re not alone. NYC may be country’s clog capital
“I don’t get why it clogged,” my roommate moans, her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, doubled over in misery on our futon.
Last weekend was an eventful one at our three-bedroom East Village apartment. Saturday night saw my normally conscientious, slightly built roommate vomiting and apologizing profusely and vomiting some more after pounding hard liquor until 3 a.m. at a house party in Brooklyn.
When I opened the door to the apartment on Sunday afternoon, after being out all morning, my poor hung-over half-to-death roommate called out from her supine position on the futon, in the loudest voice she could muster: “Don’t use the bathroom. The toilet’s clogged. I’ll fix it when I feel better.”
That evening, my other roommate and I returned with takeout dinner to find a mayday situation. Our pathetic roommate was in dire straits in the bathroom. She was holding onto the toilet’s float ball to stop the water from running, she yelled to us, and if she let go, it would flood.
We sighed and continued into the living room. I called our super while unwrapping my shawafel sandwich. “We have a problem with our toilet,” I told him. He said he’d be right up. “Diakuiu,” I said. It’s the only Ukranian word in my vocabulary; he taught it to me just the other day. Usually he gets a kick out of it when I use that word. Not this time.
Up he came, our stoic and ever-smiling landlord, armed with a plunger. But not smiling.
After a request for Tupperware containers that made us cringe, and many splattering and sucking noises, we heard a flush. Half an hour later, success. (Although now our sink is clogged… with sewage.)
So what happened? Maybe the products of my wretched roommate’s drunkenness and subsequent hung-over-ness were too much for the plumbing system in our aging tenement. Or it might just be that she had the misfortune of being the one to use it when it gave up flushing.
Whatever the cause of the cease-function, it seems that toilet clogging may happen more in New York City than elsewhere. According to a survey by SCOTT Tissue (one of those phoners where they call a hundred people in each city and ask them a series of questions), 68 percent of New Yorkers have had a clog in their home, which makes us the cloggiest of the 25 major cities they surveyed.
The survey may, of course, be bunk. The Plumbing Foundation City of New York, Inc., had never heard of it, and the guy who answered the phone there couldn’t think of any reason that New York City’s toilets would be especially clog-prone. It didn’t seem like he was trying very hard, though. I mean, I could at least make some educated guesses.
I still thought the public relations people trying to sell SCOTT’s fast-dissolving toilet paper may have stumbled onto something. So I called Henry Gifford, a pioneering engineer and former East Village landlord who knows a lot about a lot. He warned that this survey could be “baloney,” then came up with a few theories as to why it might not.
First there’s the obvious one: density. We live packed together and use fewer toilets per capita, taxing the drain pipes. “You go in the suburbs, and they build a three-bedroom house, and they have three bathrooms, or two full and one half,” says Gifford.
Then there’s the problem that some older tenements don’t have separate vent pipes, which run parallel to the drainpipe to accommodate the air that gets pushed ahead of a full plug or pulled behind it.
But there’s another issue that affects buildings old and new, big and bigger. New York has always got to be different, and that holds true for the material we use for our drain pipes: cast iron, not plastic.
“The whole country, the whole world uses plastic drains – PVC, the white plastic – and New York still uses cast iron,” says Gifford. “You’re allowed PVC under three families, under three stories, which we don’t actually build much more of in New York.”
That material is more expensive, which benefits the plumbing unions, but other than that, it has some characteristics that are problematic: a rough surface inside, and a high thermal mass, which takes heat out of the waste and causes it to condense, forming a coating of gook on the pipe’s inside surface.
So what is there to do? Plunge that thing and cross your fingers, because you’re stuck with the crapper you’ve got, no matter how crappy.
“If I owned the building I would just go change the toilet, but I guess that’s why I don’t own buildings,” says Gifford. “The smart thing to do is let it keep clogging until they get sick of it and move out, then you can raise the rent. Then when you renovate, you can put in new toilets.”
“I don’t get why it clogged,” my roommate moans, her head in her hands and her elbows on her knees, doubled over in misery on our futon.
Last weekend was an eventful one at our three-bedroom East Village apartment. Saturday night saw my normally conscientious, slightly built roommate vomiting and apologizing profusely and vomiting some more after pounding hard liquor until 3 a.m. at a house party in Brooklyn.
When I opened the door to the apartment on Sunday afternoon, after being out all morning, my poor hung-over half-to-death roommate called out from her supine position on the futon, in the loudest voice she could muster: “Don’t use the bathroom. The toilet’s clogged. I’ll fix it when I feel better.”
That evening, my other roommate and I returned with takeout dinner to find a mayday situation. Our pathetic roommate was in dire straits in the bathroom. She was holding onto the toilet’s float ball to stop the water from running, she yelled to us, and if she let go, it would flood.
We sighed and continued into the living room. I called our super while unwrapping my shawafel sandwich. “We have a problem with our toilet,” I told him. He said he’d be right up. “Diakuiu,” I said. It’s the only Ukranian word in my vocabulary; he taught it to me just the other day. Usually he gets a kick out of it when I use that word. Not this time.
Up he came, our stoic and ever-smiling landlord, armed with a plunger. But not smiling.
After a request for Tupperware containers that made us cringe, and many splattering and sucking noises, we heard a flush. Half an hour later, success. (Although now our sink is clogged… with sewage.)
So what happened? Maybe the products of my wretched roommate’s drunkenness and subsequent hung-over-ness were too much for the plumbing system in our aging tenement. Or it might just be that she had the misfortune of being the one to use it when it gave up flushing.
Whatever the cause of the cease-function, it seems that toilet clogging may happen more in New York City than elsewhere. According to a survey by SCOTT Tissue (one of those phoners where they call a hundred people in each city and ask them a series of questions), 68 percent of New Yorkers have had a clog in their home, which makes us the cloggiest of the 25 major cities they surveyed.
The survey may, of course, be bunk. The Plumbing Foundation City of New York, Inc., had never heard of it, and the guy who answered the phone there couldn’t think of any reason that New York City’s toilets would be especially clog-prone. It didn’t seem like he was trying very hard, though. I mean, I could at least make some educated guesses.
I still thought the public relations people trying to sell SCOTT’s fast-dissolving toilet paper may have stumbled onto something. So I called Henry Gifford, a pioneering engineer and former East Village landlord who knows a lot about a lot. He warned that this survey could be “baloney,” then came up with a few theories as to why it might not.
First there’s the obvious one: density. We live packed together and use fewer toilets per capita, taxing the drain pipes. “You go in the suburbs, and they build a three-bedroom house, and they have three bathrooms, or two full and one half,” says Gifford.
Then there’s the problem that some older tenements don’t have separate vent pipes, which run parallel to the drainpipe to accommodate the air that gets pushed ahead of a full plug or pulled behind it.
But there’s another issue that affects buildings old and new, big and bigger. New York has always got to be different, and that holds true for the material we use for our drain pipes: cast iron, not plastic.
“The whole country, the whole world uses plastic drains – PVC, the white plastic – and New York still uses cast iron,” says Gifford. “You’re allowed PVC under three families, under three stories, which we don’t actually build much more of in New York.”
That material is more expensive, which benefits the plumbing unions, but other than that, it has some characteristics that are problematic: a rough surface inside, and a high thermal mass, which takes heat out of the waste and causes it to condense, forming a coating of gook on the pipe’s inside surface.
So what is there to do? Plunge that thing and cross your fingers, because you’re stuck with the crapper you’ve got, no matter how crappy.
“If I owned the building I would just go change the toilet, but I guess that’s why I don’t own buildings,” says Gifford. “The smart thing to do is let it keep clogging until they get sick of it and move out, then you can raise the rent. Then when you renovate, you can put in new toilets.”
