Thumbs up for >foom< and "unplanned porcelain penetration event"
Thunderbolts and lightning very, very frightening as loo shatters, embedding porcelain shards in wall
A lightning strike to a septic tank blew up a Florida couple's toilet over the weekend, sending shards of porcelain and who-knows-what into the bathroom wall. A Facebook post by Yellow Pages-friendly "A-1 Affordable Plumbing inc" detailed the horror, later regurgitated by US news orifices such as USA Today. The couple were …
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 16:42 GMT a_yank_lurker
Re: Florida
Actually several states could qualify as the source including West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, etc. So specifying the state is necessary to understand what kind of dimbulb you are dealing with. In the case of Florida, many are snow birds from big cities who know nothing about sceptic systems. In other areas, you have different problems.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 11:52 GMT Sgt_Oddball
Shocking...
Surely Floridans should be trying to store said gas to use for green power generation and the like?
Would leave it less likely to gather in a high enough stoichiometric ratio to leave you caught out...or at least not leave you with your pants on fire.
That said if it was after some bad gator I'd hope the weather would give it a minute or two.
(safety glasses because you can never be too careful)
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 11:57 GMT Jellied Eel
So that's why
In this case, methane gas generated by the processes in the tank ignited, causing the toilet off the master bedroom to explode and "sending porcelain airborne like a missile"
And the US shitcans the INF Treaty, and prepares to deploy new cami-khazi missiles.. coincidence? I think not. But being Florida, I guess it could have been worse, with alligators or snapping turtles as part of the payload. A good reason to keep dirty bombs tightly regulated.
(Also Florida. A deadly combination of housing developers doing stuff on the cheap, and snowbirds possibly ending up with off-grid solutions and being unaware they can't just flush & forget. ISTR properly installed septic tanks including stuff like vents to prevent methane buildup & blowback scenarios. But then some of my knowledge wrt Florida came from Carl Hiassen..)
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 13:21 GMT cdegroot
Re: Cloud Processing
I have a septic tank. I was a bit of a skeptic at first but it's actually fine. Also, I don't need to read the rules of your local sewage company which had, for example, in my previous place a ban on in-sink garbage disposal units ("garburators"). I flush whatever I want and every other year (better safe than sorry) have the thing pumped for less then what I paid for sewage in the city.
All I still need is one of these outhouses with a garden gnome taking a dump while reading a newspaper to mark the spot where I have to dig up my wife's garden when the truck comes. And, apparently, a lightning rod.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 13:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Cloud Processing
I flush whatever I want
I was under the impression that there is something organic in the tank which digests and breaks down what you put into it. Do you need to be careful about what cleaning products and other chemicals go down your drain, or are the little beasties quite hardy?
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Thursday 8th August 2019 13:31 GMT Sherrie Ludwig
Re: Cloud Processing
"I was under the impression that there is something organic in the tank which digests and breaks down what you put into it. Do you need to be careful about what cleaning products and other chemicals go down your drain, or are the little beasties quite hardy?"
Living on septic system for almost twenty years, no problems. First off, it needs to be a well built one, with venting and a large leach field that you treat like the fragile thing it is, no driving large heavy machinery over it, no digging in that area deeper than planting a few flowering bulbs. Secondly use the toilet paper that disintegrates quickly, not the swans' down extra floofy that turns into a wad of cotton batting, and use biodegradable cleaning products wherever possible. There are packets of the bacteria that you can use to repopulate your system if you have to mess it up (the well needed to have chlorine run through it when we dug the pump up to replace) but I don't usually have to use them. We get the tank pumped about once every two years, couple hundred bucks in my area. Oh, and "flushable" products aren't, not even for city sewer systems, but you knew that, didn't you?
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 14:00 GMT Blergh
Re: Cloud Processing
If you don't put too many chemicals down the drain then you don't actually ever need to pump it out. My parents built their house with one 22 years ago and it is still doing fine without any intervention or smell, but they did give it a good starter with a old rotten sheep carcass and I don't suppose most people bother with that.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 14:51 GMT Wingtech
Re: Cloud Processing
You're lucky you know where it is.
Out here in the sticks, my septic tank is under a neighbouring field. The istructions we have for location is on a line due west of the Telephone Pole by the gate, take 50 paces and the 6-8 feet down.
OK as long as the pole is there. The guy who built it was a short-arse, so, is it his pace or a sort of standard pace?
Anyway, designed for zero maintenace and has been functioning for >20 years without any intervention.
Common round here, but it can all get confusing. Down one road in the village all the old houses had their tanks under the field opposite, so under the road. When they developed the field most of the new owners found that they had someone else's dunny-store under their front garden. In the old part of the village it is common to find the tank under the neighbours garden.
The perils of rural life, I suppose.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 20:59 GMT SImon Hobson
Beat me to it, a good old precedent for exploding septic tanks - icon fits the mental image he paints.
I had the honour of hearing Blaster Bates speaking live a few years back - can't have been that long before he died. I can honestly say it is the only time in my life when my sides really have hurt from laughter.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 22:22 GMT Nick Kew
So how far does that date back? Tom Sharpe was wickedly funny on the subject of exploding crap gases back in about 1980-ish (The Wilt Alternative).
Methinks El Reg is becoming obsessed. Dabbsy has a longstanding tradition of giving us crap, but just a few days ago the BOFH was on the subject, and now this story!
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Thursday 8th August 2019 02:10 GMT david 12
One of my older friends, with his pal, put half a stick of gelignite (lashed to broomstick) down a deep drop toilet. "We saw the owner come out of the house and head towards the dunny. Oh no we thought, he's going to be killed. We're going to jail for the rest of our lives. Then the gelignite went off. A /gout of blue flame/ erupted into the sky, demolishing the outhouse. Followed by a rain of shit..."
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 18:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Pressure wave
The methane exploded in the tank, and presumably then the resulting pressure wave (and ignition of methane/air mixture in the pipe) travelled up to the WC. I guess that the surrounding soil stopped the pipe from exploding outward.
By the time the pressure wave reached the WC it could have been high enough and fast enough to shatter the plumbing before the lid could lift.
I used to have an old chemistry textbook which demonstrated this. It seemed you needed a long lead pipe which was filled with a carbon monoxide (town gas) air mixture, and which ended in a boiling tube behind a suitable screen. Igniting the gas at one end resulted in a short delay before the boiling tube exploded with a very sharp bang, because the explosion front in the gas reached a thousand metres per second or so.
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Wednesday 7th August 2019 21:19 GMT SImon Hobson
Reminds me of a story an old workmate told me. He was doing up the bathroom, and the new toilet was a tight fit in the socket - the spigot was very slightly larger than on the old pan. So he figured he'd just warm up the plastic socket with a gas torch to soften it.
As he applied the flame, he heard a bit of a "woomph" down the pipe, but thought nothing of it. A day or two later, a neighbour knocked on the door and asked if their (my ex colleague's) toiler had been doing anything strange ? My ex colleague feigned ignorance of anything unusual as the neighbour explained how he'd been sat on the throne and got an unexpected bidet event at around the time my ex colleague was doing his plumbing !
Biting the hand that feeds IT
