Work pays off for sewer sleuth

PALMER — Few people know the nooks and crannies of the Dorothy Swanda Jones Borough Building as well as Toby Ridell.

For months this winter, employees smelled sewage in the building. Ridell, who does a lot of the maintenance work on the building, made it his mission to track down the smell. It became a two-month crusade.

“I’d go home dreaming about this thing. ‘Where else could it be?’”

His search started out slow, an hour here, an hour there. In the final two weeks, though, he said he spent maybe 25 to 40 hours chasing the smell.

Ridell said the very first thing he did was make sure the smell wasn’t an indication of a toxic gas leak.

“It wasn’t. So we knew we were just dealing with a septic odor that wasn’t toxic but it sure was unpleasant.”

Thus reassured, he went to the attic. There he checked out vents that, during extremely cold weather like the Valley experienced earlier this winter, tend to freeze over. With the vents plugged, drain traps, which use water to block the release of sewer gasses, can dry out.

He said he found a few plugged vents but fixing them didn’t kill the smell. Smells, he learned, can be elusive.

“It can travel,” Ridell said. “Especially if it’s inside a wall it can get into your floor joists.”

So he went looking through the building’s plans. Even that, though, got complicated. The building is more than 70 years old and has been many things in its lifetime. With the various renovations, bathrooms, kitchens and showers were torn out or moved. A lot of that work wasn’t documented or was documented in plans that have since been lost or destroyed.

“Through fires and missing parts of the plan we have parts of the building where we don’t have as-builts on,” Ridell said.

He talked to folks who’d been around awhile, found out where some of those bathrooms had been. But the smell still eluded him.

So he started punching holes in the wall.

“I had holes all over this building,” he said.

He’d poke a hole, then feed in a 3-foot snaking camera. He could then watch a video screen to see if there were pipes behind the wall. If he found pipes, he’d open up the wall to see if they were intact.

At one point he considered injecting pressurized non-toxic smoke into the system to see where it leaked out.

Finally, in a section of the building not covered in the plans he had, Ridell noticed an access panel above a concrete, fireproof vault containing some of the more important records in the building.

He shimmied into the 18-inch space. And that’s where he found it — a 3-inch cast-iron pipe bent into an elbow shape and carrying sewage.

Sometime in its installation someone, without noticing, “probably put a crack in it and over the years the rust finally got to it and a big chunk was broken out of it,” Ridell said.

He estimated the missing chunk measured 2 inches by 6 inches. It was in the top of the pipe so no effluent leaked out, just the smell.

“That was a happy day when I found that,” he said. “I sleep much better at night.”

They put duct tape over the hole until they could get replacement parts in from Anchorage. And now the building smells a lot nicer. And his co-workers are grateful.

“People are still thanking me,” Ridell said. “One lady here in the building wrote a tribute, an ode, based on the Beverly Hillbillies [theme].”

Though the smell is gone, Ridell said Wednesday he’s still got some drywall work to do.

“Now I’m spending about 10 hours patching and fixing everything, putting it back together,” he said.