THUNDER BAY — Just like renovating an old house, working on sewer lines that have been buried for over a century sometimes brings surprises and unintended consequences.
A contractor hired by the City of Thunder Bay inadvertently shut down a washroom in the Elks Lodge after being instructed to fill an obsolete sanitary sewer pipe with concrete.
The clay pipe, installed in 1908, was being decommissioned.
In the 200 block of Syndicate Avenue, the old sewer was removed during recent sewer and water rehabilitation work.
The same line runs in front of the lodge, but it's beneath a former section of Syndicate that is now a parking lot.
Rather than digging up the lot unnecessarily, the city elected to fill the old pipe with cement slurry.
No one knew it serviced one of the washrooms and the kitchen area in the lodge, as the construction of the Thunder Bay Courthouse in the early part of the decade had revealed two sewer connections to the building from Miles Street.
The existence of the third connection only became known on Sept. 18 when Elks Lodge staff noticed their drains were backing up.
Remedying the problem required some excavation in the parking lot in order to install a new line, as well as jackhammering the floor of a utility room, at an estimated cost of $20,000 to $25,000.
City Project Engineer Rick Harms told Tbnewswatch old sewer lines are removed from service because of their potential liability to the city.
Sinkholes are one of the risks.
"In fact we're still investigating one on Donald Street where we just did the pavement last year. There was an old sewer there, and now we've got a problem with a hole," Harms said.
Outside the Elks Lodge, repairs are expected to be completed by Thursday.
That's welcome news to the staff and patrons of the bar where plastic dishes have been used for the last two weeks because of the unavailability of the dishwasher.
