Sewerage Damage - Part 2

The sewer “explosions” only ever seem to happen on long weekends.

I’m not completely certain of all details, as luckily this was not one of my tenants. However it was similar circumstances to our situation.

The main difference being this blockage actually came from council land, which meant instead of the landlord being responsible the council was. This is very fortunate for the tenants, as they didn’t have contents insurance, and the council is covering everything. They have even put them up in temporary accommodation until everything is sorted.







It’s a terrible feeling knowing that all of your belongings have been damaged by faeces, and somehow it’s made even worse by the knowledge that it’s not just your faeces… I’m not sure why, it just is.

Sewerage Damage

This is a more common problem then you might be led to believe, not only does it happen to tenants, but I can also give you a first hand account of what it’s like, as I’ve been victim to a house flooded with sewerage too!

In our instance, we were living in a unit complex. We awoke Easter Sunday to find all our pipes blocked, and after unsuccessfully trying to unblock them, we found out it was a problem with the entire complex, not just us. This was handy as it meant we didn’t need to contact our property manager, the strata agent would take care of it for us.

We went out for a leisurely day with the family, and returned later in the afternoon to find the plumbers packing up, and a small clean up operation happening as there was a good bit of water about the place that had gotten into some garages and the like. We chatted out the front with one of the other occupants of the complex about what needed to be done. It turned out that there was a massive blockage in the main pipe that needed to be pressurised to be removed.

I made my way inside and went to get changed, I walked in through the hallway (barefoot mind) and stopped dead, realising that the carpets were soaked. We’d had a problem with our washing machine previously where it just pored water all over the floor, so I quickly made my way back out to my partner and informed him that “the washing machine has done it again!” I turned back into the unit and could see my footsteps down the hallway. This confused me, as you don’t generally get footsteps showing up in wet carpet.

I slipped some thongs on and made my way further down the hallway and looked into the bathroom. The property was a catastrophe! I’ll let photos speak for themselves.

We immediately tried contacting our property manager, who being on holidays had his phone turned off. So we left a message asking him to contact us urgently.

Without much else of an option we picked up the cat and headed over to our friends place for the night, knowing that this wasn’t going to be resolved by night time.

After a couple of hours we tried contacting our agent again. Still no answer, so we left another message. “Please contact us ASAP, it’s urgent!”

Another couple of hours passed and we decided that clearly our message wasn’t indicating the type of situation we were in, so we called again, this message sounded more along the lines of “Call us now, there is shit half way up the walls of our unit, We need something done now!”

Sure enough a few minutes later we heard back from him. We explained what had happened and he organised to come out and have a look the following day, and bring cleaners with him.

We contacted our contents insurer and went through the process with them, they told us that they wouldn’t be able to get an assessor to the property until Tuesday at the earliest, which we tried arguing with for a while, however there was nothing they could do.

The following day we headed back to the unit and met the agent and his cleaners. The cleaners clearly had no idea what they were in for, as they turned up with a broom, a mop and bucket, and some cleaning products.

Inside, what was brown yesterday, was white today… One of the cleaners pointed to the laundry floor and said with a swallow “Is that white stuff toilet paper?” To which I had the pleasure of replying “Nope, yesterday it was brown”

The agent got the landlord’s insurance on the phone and we spoke to them about temporary accommodation and other issues.

I’ve since learned that the landlord is in no way responsible for temporary accommodation. In these instances where the property becomes unliveable you are presented with what is called a “frustrated lease” which in effect brings the lease to an end. The tenants can move all of their furniture out and stop paying rent immediately without any penalties.*

We were put up in a local hotel for the time that we couldn’t be living in the house.

While the assessors from our insurance company where less then desirable (they took forever to get back to us, they undervalued all of our belongings, they didn’t understand that while they were taking forever, our belongings were steeping in faeces, etc.) The people behind the scenes at the insurance company were incredible. They kept us in contact to make sure we where happy with the process, when we complained about the assessors they got us on a conference call to find out what the delays were – this was great, I got to listen in while the assessor fluffed out some stupid response, and could only manage to apologise.

In the end, the landlord’s insurance company had to replace the carpet and vinyl throughout, pay for our accommodation and reimburse us for the rent that we paid the week we were out of the property and for our excess.

Our insurance company paid to replace our lounge chair, a pine side board, our vacuum cleaner, a stereo that had been sitting on the ground at the time, all of our shoes, our bedside tables and chest of drawers, and they also paid to get all of our clothes dry cleaned. Thanks to our content insurance we really came out on top in the end. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Next up – it strikes again! One of our tenant’s have just gone through the same issue! This time without contents insurance.

*This is the case for leases in NSW. I’m not sure if this is the case in all states.