Back in the summer in the middle of the night I was awaken by the toilet seat slamming down and Catherine running (like a penguin from a polar bear given her current shape) across the bedroom screaming, “Rat, Rat, Rat in the Toilet!” I immediately sprung up and ran towards the bathroom, but then hesitated before I crossed the threshold. Wait, if there really was a rat in our toilet, who knows where it is now…and I’m standing barefooted in boxers near the bathroom door.
So I stop for second and try to calm Catherine down enough for her to tell me what she saw, where she saw it, and in which direction it was headed. According to her, she was about to make her routine middle-of-the-night snack run to the kitchen when, on her customary first stop-off to the bathroom, she walks in, turns on the light (which isn’t always the case, but forever will be now) and begins to squat down just as she hears some flopping and splashing around in the toilet bowl below her. She quickly looks down to find a 3-4 inch rat with about a 4-5 inch tail squirming around in the toilet bowl!
Equipped with this information, I creep into the bathroom just far enough to peer into the bowl…there was no rat to be found (which I’m not sure is a good or a bad thing - I’ll get to this in a minute), but he did leave behind evidence of some little rat “droppings”. To ease Catherine’s fear as to where this thing might now be, I propose that he just came in from a flooding storm drain (it was during a major summer rain storm), found a good safe spot, and starting doing his “business” only to get interrupted by her in the process and ran back down the drain - no harm, no foul, over and done with. Yeah, right!
A couple things to mention before I proceed with the story…
- Since this happened, many people we’ve told (which I was conflicted about doing) have commented that this story has totally changed their bathroom habits…For one, they ALWAYS turn on the light now when going in the middle of the night, and/or two, they ALWAYS look down before taking a squat.
- As for deciding whether or not to share this story with others, I’m was philosophically opposed to it from the standpoint that I just wouldn’t want to know about it happening to others and thus live in fear wondering about the possibility of it happening to me. But apparently I’m the only one that felt this way, Catherine went and told all the neighbors the day after it happened.
Back to the story…WHERE DID IT GO? Did it really go back down the toilet? In other words, is this wet rat now scurrying around our house?!? Or is it back down in our plumbing looking for another way out? (And thereby rendering all bathrooms in the house a major hazard and strictly off limits pending further notice).
Catherine turned and ran as soon as she saw it, it’s not like she stayed staring at it trying to study it’s movement or identify it (kind of like when on the golf course or hiking in the woods you say you saw a snake and people ask, “well was it poisonous?” With any of these species and a few others that come to mind, I don’t bother to take a second look, I’m already facing the other way fleeing the scene). I’m of the theory that Catherine scared the rat just as much as it scared her (ok, maybe not as much) and it went right back down the toilet and back into the sewer system. What’s more, evidenced by the droppings it left in the bowl, Catherine literally scared the sh*t out of it. Plus, Baxter, who loves chasing rodents and who's bed is laying on the floor by the bathroom door, never so much as flinched. But then again, even with all this going on he never got out of his bed, which somewhat leaves me to believe he could have just not seen it (although that runs against my theory that he went back down the drain).
But anyway, the real question here is what is the better option? A wet rat loose in the house or a terrified rat somewhere in our plumbing looking for a way out? It's really a lesser of two evils, but with hindsight being 20-20 I’d rather have the rat loose in house with the hopes that I could eventually trap and kill it, and thus naively thinking that this would bring complete closure to the matter. However, it's kind of a trick question since the conclusion and resulting course of action wouldn't have changed since now, according to Catherine, we have a MAJOR RAT PROBLEM! Therefore the resulting ramifications, implications, and complications would all have been the same. Here is a look at them on various categorical levels...
- Financial – Who pays for any work that's got to be done here? I was pretty sure I already knew the answer to this (me), but if so, how much and what all are we talking about?
- Physical – This has been more on Catherine that me, since she is now tromping upstairs to go to the bathroom every time now - the thinking being that going up one story greatly reduces the chance of this happening again. While I don't necessarily agree with this theory, I don't bother to tell her that if a rat can make it all the way up a sewer line and into our toilet I doubt an extra 10-12 feet of vertical pipe is going to make a difference. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut on this one because our next move would be renting one of those golf tournament style bathrooms and putting it in the backyard because she certainly isn't going to be using the downstairs bathrooms again anytime soon.
- Emotional – First and foremost, living in fear every time you sit (or should I say hover) over the toilet is something I wouldn't wish on anyone. And then as a close second, which you’ll see the extent of as the story unfolds, the frustration of dealing with city workers and playing mediator between two local government departments (health dept. and utilities/public works) can really test your sanity and tolerance. In some ways I came to feel sorry for these guys as they now had an angry, pregnant woman who didn't feel safe using the bathroom in her own house coming after them.
Well as the story progresses, over the next several weeks Catherine has all kinds of crews coming out from the city. Usually I take the lead on these type of things, but she could see early on that my sense of urgency just wasn't high enough to get this resolved in as quick of manner as she’d like. Literally it went from having their card and phone number on the fridge, to her having them stored into her phone, and then to all she had to do was just hit redial on either her cell phone or the house phone.
As the saga unfolds and you read through the series of steps (and missteps) by the city, just keep the following two things in the back of your mind…One) Throughout all of this, Catherine stayed on top of these people like a hawk. By this I mean confirming scheduled work sessions the day before, usually staying home during these times to oversee, and then if needed emailing/calling the next day to hear a report and seeing what the next course of action was; and Two) this was a collaborative job between to two local government agencies, the health dept. and the public works (sewer) people...and by 'collaborative' I mean a lot of finger pointing and little to no communication between the two - if it wasn't for Catherine.
Step 1) Filling the random varmint holes (4) in the yard and seeing if and where they reappear: This first step was literally nothing more than my brief description. The goal here being to see if the holes are "active" and if they were near the sewer pipelines (drawn out in a lovely florescent green spray paint across my lawn and sidewalk by the way)…which meant I might have a break in my sewer line that the rats were gaining access through. The key here was which holes got re-dug and where they were in my yard - the city's property side or mine, because that determines who pays for it. As it turned out, 3 of the 4 holes reappeared, so that didn't tell us much, except to Catherine, to whom it screamed of an even larger rat problem. On to step two immediately...
Step 2) Baiting the holes and scheduling a "smoke test": Not really meant as a solution to the root of problem, but perhaps to provide some immediate relief as a first line of defense (or offense really). The problem with this step was that we may not see the results (i.e. dead rat or rats in the yard) of this for a week or so, if at all. In the meantime, it was decided to run a "smoke test", which we got on the schedule for a couple days later, which wouldn't have happened had it not been for repeated phone calls and emails by Catherine.
Step 3) First Smoke Test: Since several of the varmint holes they filled in reappeared, there was no clear-cut point of entry to our sewer system. So the next step was to figure out where the crack (or cracks) might be by doing what's called a "smoke test".
While we knew this was the next step, we weren't given a date as to when it would occur, and of course no clue what to expect with it. I just know that one day at work I got one of those phone calls that catches you completely off-guard and leaves you bewildered as to what exactly to do with the information you learned. Literally my cell phone rings while at my desk one day with our handyman on the phone who was doing some work on the nursery at the time (crown moulding, removal of popcorn ceiling, etc) and as I recall the conversation went something like this...
Me: "Hello"
Handyman: "Um yeah, Mr. Walters, just wanted to let you know there are some dudes in front of your house with a backhoe and there is a lot of smoke coming out of your yard in various places."
Me: "Um, ok…hold on, what, where?"
Handyman: "Well like I said, there is smoke spewing out of several places and it looks like they're about to start digging." (Note: At this point I really wanted to then just tell him to call Catherine's cell and hang up as if this call never happened).
Me: "Well can you go out there and tell them to stop where they are and not to touch my yard without talking to me or Catherine first?" (Knowing full well they'd be in touch with Catherine and not me on this).
Handyman: "Ok, I'll tell them to get on outta here for now." (He welcomes confrontation and drama so I figured he'd be up to the task).
Well since they weren't able to finish this test session it was scheduled for them to come back the following week (again, thanks to Catherine's persistence).
Step 4) Second Smoke Test: This was scheduled for a Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM, so of course we didn't see a soul until 8:30 and it didn't get underway until 8:45. With Catherine running the show, this had all the makings of one of those times where I'm better off fleeing the scene, but by the time I was about to leave smoke had already started pouring out of random spots of the yards up and down our street and engulfing the neighborhood, so I quickly decided I had to stay and check this out.
Now, there are a few more things to point out here as I continue to tell the rest of this story...
One) Leave it to the city not to let anyone on the block know this was being done and how it could affect them…which, we had no clue it would, remember it was all new (and news) to us. I just assumed they sent some smoke up (or down) through our pipes and waited to see where it came out.
Two) We live in an old neighborhood where the houses, even if renovated, have the same pipes connecting to the sewer system from the 1950's. So only if you happened to have one of these pipes burst would you have had a reason to have an updated pipes and valves - it's all about the valves. You see, at some point in between 1951 - 2010 (I'm guessing 1986), it dawned on someone that it might be a good idea to install a one-way valve on the pipe that connects the sewer to your toilet in order to keep things, namely rats, from running back up into it.
Three) With old neighborhoods come older neighbors (which we love to have, they watch the neighborhood like gatekeepers, especially during the day), so when a work crew with several trucks arrived on the street you can be sure they were all on full alert. But I don't think all the advance notice in the world could have prepared them for the fact that smoke was about to come pillowing out of their yards and gardens (which as you know, older people obsess over) and even come out of their sinks and toilets. Next thing we knew all the senior citizens around us were dropping what they were doing and storming into the street...I'm talking women in full gardening outfits (and they do have a full ensembles - gloves, hats, pants with built-in knee pads, etc.) and elderly men with a newspaper underneath their arm, shirt tail out and belt still undone.
I can't explain (and neither could the city – shocker) why there was so much smoke rising out of the ground everywhere else in our neighborhood, it was all we could do to come to grips with what was transpiring in our yard. Smoke somehow ended up rising out of all four of the burrow holes (see below picture). As a result, this didn't help us get any closer to pinpointing the break in the line, all it told us was that apparently we have an underground network of tunnels in our yard...and to Catherine, that raised the level of our rat problem from "major" to "extremely severe".
So it is then determined by the city that the next step would be to come back out to perform a “camera test”. This is where they stick a hose with a video camera on the end down the various holes in hopes of seeing where the break in the sewer pipe is. Of course, given that we were moving on “government time” this doesn’t get scheduled to take place for a couple more weeks, and would have been even longer had Catherine not stayed on top of them.
At this point, the saga had dragged on for over a month now with still no end in sight. In the meantime, Catherine, more and more pregnant by the day, was still hiking it up the stairs every time she goes to the bathroom – which as you know, is rather frequent for pregnant women. I tried to save her the effort and energy by convincing her to “hover” over the toilets downstairs for just the “tinkle” trips to bathroom, which was the majority anyway, but she was having none of it.
Upon recommendation from the health inspector, we kept five-pound dumbbell weights on the toilet lids all this time to keep anything from creeping back up (and out) of the toilet. Apparently the guy felt that just closing the toilet lids alone was not enough to keep the rats from escaping and coming into the house - I didn't necessarily agree we had to go to this extreme, but I'll take his word for it since can't imagine the size rats this guy comes across in his line of work. While having to always lift the weight off the lid, find somewhere to put it (or just hold it), and then lower the lid and put the weight back on was a major annoyance for me, one silver lining to it all that my wife pointed out was that this ordeal did further train me to put the toilet seat back down.
However, this wasn't the only change to my going to the bathroom routine, in addition to always turning on the light and always looking down before sitting down (when needed), I also made sure to sneak a peak under the toilet lid each time. To remain at a safe distance when sneaking a peak, I went so far as to keep the “Fetch It” dog retriever stick in one bathroom and used the plunger handle in the other. And then as a last desperate line of defense, I reduced the water level in the toilet bowls - just thinking that the lower shoreline could deter the rats from trying to scale a now taller porcelain wall to freedom.
As the story progresses (even though we'd really made no progress), the day before the camera test was scheduled, we finally had a major break in the case – or so I thought. Upon coming home from work one day I happened to notice something lying in the yard by the sidewalk leading up to our front door. As I got closer I discovered it was in fact a dead rat lying in the yard! (see picture below). The bait in the holes must have worked, we’d taken down the culprit and this saga can now finally come to a close, right? Not quite…
Despite my contention was that this dead rat was a "lone gunman" and not part of a larger clan of house invading rodents, Catherine insisted that this was just a coincidental death in an extended family of rats that inhabited the system of tunnels under our yard. And although this one seemed large to me, she remembered the true culprit as being much bigger, which as a result, this one was considered to be of a younger (smaller) generation, thereby moving the needle farther up on the "We Have Rat Infestation" meter. On to the next step, no more questions asked...
Step 5) Camera Test: All this really consisted of was sticking a snake hose with a eye-ball video camera on the end up through the holes in our yard to try and a break in the pipe. Although smoke came out off all the holes, chances were they are inter-connected underground so it could come out of all of them despite only one crack somewhere in the pipes. But regardless of whether they found four cracks or one, the next step was still going to be the same - digging up and replacing the cracked pipes in my yard.
The greater implication of this step was that it would determine just how hard of a hit we were going to take as a result of this whole ordeal...and by that I mean who's property it was on, and by that I mean who's about to take the finanical hit to pay for all this work? Basically the rule is, if you own it (where the problem is), you pay to fix it.
Going into the camera test the guy from the city told me the results could be inconclusive, and sure enough they were. When asked how or why this didn't work, the crewman just replied that the camera is normally meant for use in pipes not holes. Apparently the government quality camera either didn't have enough resolution to make out a crack and/or got covered over with mud from rooting through the holes. I felt like asking him how that is different from the other type of "mud" the camera encounters when searching through sewer pipes, but didn't bother. Oh well, on to the next step...
Step 6) Just start digging: This step was really just a matter of doing exactly what it says - just start digging along the pipelines until they find the crack. While that sounds all well and good and a has very clear-cut finality to it, it's not exactly the best thing for my yard if I have any hopes of seeing green grass return before the spring of 2012 (although it's not like my lawn is that green in August anyway). However, it was becoming very clear to me that this was going to have to be the trade-off in order for Catherine to regain enough peace of mind to use her own bathrooms in comfort (well in comfort is probably a stretch, just getting her using them again period is more realistic).
So luckily and thankfully they start digging at the area by the street next to the water meter with plans to work their way up the pipe leading to my house. The reason I say luckily is that after only about forty-five minutes and eight feet of digging they find an old unused and un-capped pipe, or lateral as they call it. Apparently this old clay pipe, probably going back to when the house was built in the early ‘50’s, was left in the ground when new sewer piping was installed at some point in the last couple decades. Why it was left there, and more importantly, why it was never sealed off is beyond me, but evidently all it took for the rat (yes, singular, not plural) to gain access to our sewer/plumbing system was to squeeze into this old pipe through about a two inch crack that had expanded over time.
And the reason I say thankfully is that this was discovered on city property between the street and the sidewalk, which translates to no out of pocket expenses on my end. Whew, this was a huge relief, but I would argue that we (or mainly Catherine) have paid a steep price for all of this already...and in some ways more painful than anything financial.
After this discovery, the origin of the story started to become clear...The public works guy and I hypothesized that the rat must have burrowed in and made a habitat out of this old pipe, and then, during the torrential downpour that preceded this entire debacle, the rushing storm water started filling up the sewer and all connected pipes to the point his little hideaway got flooded and forced him to evacuate. As I put myself into the mind of the rat (primarily for the purpose of rationalizing and downplaying his actions to Catherine), I’d imagine that scared, disoriented, and in a state-of-panic the little guy went looking for air and dry land - and our master bathroom toilet literally seemed like the best "port in a storm".
So honestly, if this is the theory we’re going with, I can’t say I blame him for coming up through our toilet. Although, this theory would lend itself to the notion that the rat did in fact get into our house that night - either by coming out of the toilet he was discovered in or going back down and coming out another toilet unbeknownest to us. No, I didn't bother mentioning this part to Catherine, I left it to her to draw her own conclusions. But on the bright side it, if this had happened, it would have all but eliminated the perceived threat of him coming back up one of our toilets...not to mention the subsequent two months of living in fear of it happening again.
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I wish I had a more climatic ending to the story, but it is rather fitting that it ends inconclusively since that's the theme to how it unraveled all along and in some ways still is this way. While I'm somewhat convinced we got to the bottom of this, I'm less than 100% confident it couldn't happen all over again. Basically, I think there was always was like a 1 in 1,000 chance that this could happen, and I'm not convinced these odds have improved all that much despite all we've been through.
However, there is a trifecta of lessons to be learned in all this to lessen the chances of it happening...First, the greater, more proactive move would be making sure you have a one-way valve installed your toilet lines, or getting this done if not. The other two reactionary steps, which I've mentioned already, is to always turn on the lights and, more importantly, always look down before squatting down.
And should this happen to you (and I know this sounds counter-intuitive), hopefully the rodent escapes out of the toilet, effectively making your house a large cage that you can then try to capture it in and bring the incident to a relatively faster close without going anywhere near the plumbing and sewer system (or dealing with the local government).
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