Thar she blows!

Oh, the joys of home ownership. I was on the phone with a friend, when all of a sudden my downstairs toilet was making loud splashing, almost flushing noises. When I looked, water was spitting out the sides. When I pulled up the lid, it came splashing up from the bottom of the bowl.

YUCK!

I quickly shut the lid. It quit after a few more minutes. What was wrong? Then I scrambled for my home repair guide. Nothing about toilets spraying from the bottom up. Is it my sewer line, is it clogged? Then the kids:

WC#2: (laughing her head off) Mommy, you got to come upstairs and see this.

Me: What?! What happened? Is it the toilet?

WC#2: (still laughing) the bathroom is all wet.

Me:(mad dash upstairs)

Only to discover the lid was up on this toilet and the floor was covered with water. Lucky for us, nobody forgot to flush. And I just cleaned this toilet yesterday, so it should have been relatively clean. But, eww! And ick! No sewage in the sinks or tubs, no backed up water in the basement.

More trying to find something on the internet about spraying toilets. NOTHING!

So, I call Ace Hardware. Beyond them, I should call a plumber. I call the plumber. They get back to me, as I'm heading to Walgreens to get a printer cartridge refilled. I see some city trucks on my street. Hmmm.... I point this out to the plumber. He says they could be flushing the sewer main and this can happen. Only a one time event. He suggests I call the city to see if that's what it is.

When I return home, I call public works, tell him what street I'm on and what happened. "Oh, yeah, they might be working over there today."

Nice, they don't even know what they're doing. Yeah, and I did see them going down the sewer hole.

Now, wouldn't it be nice if they put up signs that say they might be flushing sewer mains and you could get toilet blow?

So, for those of you that have wondered, I'm going to put a sentence in here, so when you search for "toilet spraying," "toilet spray from bowl," "toilet sewer spray" or anything like that, hopefully you'll find this blog entry and know that your municipality is flushing the sewers and didn't bother to tell you!